Your browser is holding you back. Level up with Opera GX: operagx.gg/DarylTalksGames7 What is your favorite treacherous checkpoint? What did I miss? Let me know below!
I'm surprised there wasn't a mention of the one workbench in The Last of Us Part II, that genuinely made me jump as i had put down the controller to get a snack when I heard the commotion
Cave Story does a really funny thing where one of the very first doors you encounter in the game is actually an enemy you have to defeat before going through the door, so first-time players will distrust many doors afterwards, but this never happens again
I love Cave Story tbh, easily one of my favorite 'jokes', introducing something at the start of the game, and then never show it again. What's funny is that everytime I replay it, it always gets me for that exact reason lmao.
tbh Cave Story has a ton of game design bits that I feel like their only logical origin has to be "It'd be funny doe." Like the whole thing with fucking Booster in the Labyrinth is absurd.
@@Alt-fg3ml Skipping the first fight against Balrog feels like a similar joke, where if you just say "I don't want to fight" he just goes, "Oh, okay" and peaces out
It's truly a genre experience, it's not only relate to one game - look at souls games. I've never trusted chests in Elden Ring, just because of being afraid of mimic or trap (different than teleportation). It's curious that if there wasn't a single trap in this game I would be... dissapointed
Reminds me of Luigi's mansion 1 where there are various fake doors that hurt you when you try to go through them. They are pretty easy to identify because the map only shows the real door locations, and the vacuum will rattle real doors but not fake ones.
The original Resident Evil 3 has a moment where you return to the save point after spending a long time searching for an item. You enter the room and there is no save song. You approach the typewriter and nemesis crashes down from the roof. Starting a chase sequence when we least want it. Original Dead Space has a save spot that makes a necromorph spawn breathing down your neck when you finish upgrading your weapon.
The original Resident Evil 2 also has a safe room where the safe room itself is safe, but if you open a door on the far side, two zombies walk through it and you're forced back into the safe room to fight them as a truly terrifying track plays. This is a double example of breaking xenia because this is the only time in the game where you're attacked while in the room transition cutscenes. I played that game when I was twelve and I'm *still* a little afraid of that stupid door.
REmake 2 hall savepoint, where Mr X can enter. It's not the same thing as the aforementioned events because it's not a save room as the others, but I remember finding Leon dead in the entrance hall when I got back from grabing some water. I was like: wtf?
I feel like in the Hollow Knight example, it's important to note that a real save point is found very, very shortly after the fake one. If memory serves there's no combat between the two and no way to miss it. It wants to mess with you, but it''s not actually trying to screw up your progress.
You are in the middle of a maze, with the center being that checkpoint as well as the start point, so you can't progress at all until you escape, no saving partway through. And if you go in what the game seems to be telling you is the intended order, you will have to get through that maze twice, one of then going backwards! Once to escape, and once to find the goal inside.
@@Nightfire613yes, but you never lose progress. If you die, you start from the webs after the fake bench but with all your health. You just can’t change charms.
@@tsirakura1684you've missed the point of what makes that bench unsettling. It's because you have no idea where you are until you find the exit and realise it's just above the fake bench, but until then, you're stuck in these corridors with dangerous enemies and ambushes
@@nikolapetric7089 I know what the point is, I’ve got over 1k hours in the game and still remember the horror I felt when I first sat on that bench. What I shared is still a fact about how the game works, you won’t lose any progress however scared you are.
While also making you a little nervous still about them in the first game. Since the first one you go into, you see a necromoph rip the doors open. Showing they can definitely get through them even if it gets immediately killed by them a moment later. Nevermind that (at least I'm pretty sure there are some that do this) some of the elevators will open the door behind you instead of the one you came in from.
There's a save point in Dead space 1 where a necromorph can attack you the moment you save. In fact this breaks Zenia for me so much that when I went to the same corridor in Dead space 2, I immediately escape the safe machine and point frantically behind me waiting for an attack that ... never comes.
Miyazaki was once asked about the mimic bonfire. He responded by saying that he wouldn't dream of betraying the player's trust like that. He probably felt the same as you've mentioned: players would no longer trust bonfires for the rest of the game.
Many normies, including a lot of cashgrabbing journalists (I'm not actually a journalist hater like so many gamers tend to be because they are easy to manipulate by ragebait) used to, and still do, spread around this idea that Dark Souls was the "hardest game evar omg lol xd" And with that came the stereotype, born from nothing but sheer ignorance and stupidity, that dark souls, and soulslikes in general, are for "masochists". For people who want to suffer and never enjoy good gamedesign. This effectively was not only one of the vilest misinterpretations and therefore sources of misinformation on what Dark Souls was all about, it was also just plain manipulative and effectively ushered in an era of second rate games trying to emulate that "masochism". In reality, miyazaki never meant to make the "hardest game" (and didn't succeed even if that WAS his intent. Only zoomers would have considered dark souls to be hard. Sure there are hard spikes in difficulty, and some levels and bosses are just plain badly designed, but overall the difficulty is perfectly fine. You don't need to be a challengerunner or speedrunner to play it. You just need to not be a complete moron.) He just remembered what games used to be like, what was so fun about these challenging games, what worked and what didn't, and built his game around that premise. (Obviously, he started doing that with demons souls, not dark souls, but it's not like the internet ever gave him credit for it. History, to many zoomer gamers, starts in 2011, not 2009. Justified or not.) And the game design reflects that inherent aversion to the "masochist" mentality detractors, and in some cases glorifiers, of Miyazaki's work claim soulslikes are all about. To this very day, you constantly find edgy ragebaiters and elitist fanboys alike, claiming their victory or failure over a freaking game has turned them into masochists, or has given them an aversion to "masochistic" game design. This is an inherent failure to recognize good from bad gamedesign. A failure to recognize good from bad reward systems. This mentality is inherent to the sheepherd gamers who either grew up on or got mentally culled by the slew of handholding games that started to explode around the early 2010's, and whose influence and constant poison we still experience to this day. No. Dark souls is not masochistic. Nor is it perfect. Nor does it want to "punish" the player. Nor does miyazaki like to "torture" the gamer. Nor is the game's quality RELIANT on that fact. Miyazaki, from the very get-go, understood the sacred nature of the contract that the developer signs along with the player. Yes, these games might toy with the concept a little here and there, but never to such an outrageous degree, as violating the sacred trust that, for instance, the bonfire provides. (Not that I am claiming games that don't do this are inherently bad. They're just trying something different. And I would guess that they TOO aren't there to be masochistic, except maybe fear and hunger. This game just seems plain evil.) There is nothing more annoying to me, than seeing a gamer complain about some badly designed boss in one of these games (especially elden ring, which has garnered a following of critically blind fanboy sheepherds. As if the game can't do wrong.) and get reactions from these elitist dickheads saying they're just "playing the game wrong" or that they just need to "git gud". As if souls veterans need to get told to git gud merely because they think gimmicky fights or attacks that cover all of the screen or unpredictable delayed combos or one-shot kills are bad design. You find this mentality of elitism, absolutely festering in the souls community, whose pride seems to be derived from the fact they once beat a fromsoft game that one time. A true achievement and highest honor to these spoiled western privileged cunts. As if, indeed, elden ring and dark souls were either the holy grails of game design (they aren't, far from it, these games are fundamentally flawed in several ways, and that's okay.) or the worst games of all time, sent to earth to destroy our puny gamer brains with mental torture. As if all forms of criticism, constructive or otherwise, need to be banished to the nine hells for the AUDACITY of it. Miyazaki never had that mentality, and actively seems to read and listen to complaints and criticism. Nor should his fans or detractors. It's time to grow up.
@@RedFloyd469 you let it slip a bit by adding the "western" to the "priviliged cunts" phrase. Tbh, I agree with you, but the difference is that I am happy at these things. Because dark souls managed to get game marketers to call it masochistic, smile and recommend it after informing of that fact! Which conveyed the exact idea you explained (which is, ironically, that its not masochistic at all). Because don't forget, reviewers do absolutely often call something "difficult" and then give it a poor review because of that reason. That intuitively conveys to the readers that the challenge is not fun to beat, that it _is_ actually masochistic. Yeah, that does misinform the readers on the actual definition of those words. Most creators do understand that customers don't know that they really want or mean though, so its not as big of a deal as you make it to be.
I actually appreciate that Dark Souls and Resident Evil don't troll you with fake safe zones because it would violate one of the core creative pillars of their game design and needlessly punish the player out of spite
I dunno, I would love just _one_ fake save point. Just one, in only one game, and one you can foresee like the music sounding off or blood splatters on the walls, stuff like that.
Original Resident Evil 3 has it in the clock tower. If you run away from Nemesis when going to save he jumps down through the roof glass at the save spot. Its super creepy because when you enter the room there is no music.
To add a little as the dev of I Wanna Be The Guy, and, hilariously, the person who coined the term Mental Stack, part of the reason the "Evil" save point is the last one is because I actually wanted to avoid adding to the player's mental stack. The game had enough paranoia, and I didn't want to make the player paranoid about *the one* thing I was treating as sacred. ... Buuut since I built up all that good will, I might as well have spent it at the end, where it wouldn't have any long term repercussions on how players approached the game. ;)
That's the perfect way to do it. Because even if you do one fake out and even if you shortly after give a real one, it will forever linger on the player's thoughts of "What if this one isn't real?" and "What if the next one doesn't have a save so close?" I'm sure most people would say they'd love at least one fake out, but the end of the game is the only place for that, because otherwise, it'll always weigh on the player's mind. I'm sure there's some exceptions, as it's a mix of many things, but it's soemthing one must be very careful if they do test the player's trust.
Was obsessed with that game, I'm not even a fan of 2d platformers but it felt more like a puzzle game that constantly outsmarted me. Good memories, I think I still have the laptop I downloaded it on all that time ago
Darkest Dungeon, in my humble opinion, is one of the greatest games ever made. Hearing the premise "what would actually happen to somebody, not just physically, but also psychologically, were they to explore video game dungeons?" was all I needed to be sold. My girlfriend lovingly refers to it as a "middle management simulator." Side note: She's also a writer, and a pretty great one at that, and became obsessed with the game's writing and Wayne June's impeccable narration. Two enthusiastic thumbs up from the both of us.
@@angelus_lucifero Oh I absolutely agree, the immersion especially the way they craft the atmosphere using sound design brought me to another gem - Inscryption. 100% recommend playing it if you enjoy the logistics and vibe of Darkest Dungeon!
People sometimes compare Darkest Dungeon with Fear & Hunger and as someone who has played both, I can say it's true the games are similar, except that Darkest Dungeon is actually fun.
At one point during Amnesia: The Bunker, the safe room music no longer plays in the room. You might not notice it at first, given how stressful the game is. And then you find out why: the beast has dug a hole in the wall from which it can crawl out of. The room is no longer safe.
@@reformed_attempt_1 Pretty sure the hole is purely decorative, as to signal that time is running low in general and not just fuel. But I've heard (no proof) that save room's doors can be broken by the monster
@GreatNaturalStupidity The Beast cannot break down the doors, however once the hole is dug the Beast can enter the save room. The Beats cannot enter the generator room.
It's tied to difficulty. On the standard difficulty settings the stalker won't enter the safe room from the hole, but if you carelessly leave the doors open it can definitely follow you into the safe room, and even the generator room. Try it yourself. Then the 2023 Halloween update came along and the Shell Shock difficulty was added. On Shell Shock, not only can the stalker spawn from the hole that appears in the safe room, the doors to the room are now made of wooden boards instead of metal, meaning that once they're broken they're gone for the rest of the playthrough. It also costs fuel to use the lantern so you have to decide if you'd rather save or keep the lights on a little longer, because when they go out the stalker will never stop hunting you. Shell Shock also has: - Increased generator fuel consumption - A fuse system that prevents the lights in areas from coming on with the generator until the fuses are fixed - Increased and randomized spawns of trip-wire traps and killer rats - Randomized spawning locations for essential items - Lowered spawn rates and random spawn locations for all other items - Greatly increased stalker aggression, alertness, activity, and worst of all, unpredictability. It'll create diversions, silently lie in wait, route you into dead ends while you try to escape, things like that. It's fun!
My favorite example of this isn't from a safe-room or save point, but your pause menu. In the horror game Yomawari: Midnight Shadows from NIS America, you're opening your pause menu a lot in the intro scene to check the map, check your inventory, and check your objective. The third or fourth time you do it, you're guided to find a new item and read it's description, when a monster slams its hands onto your pause-menu, pulls it down and jump-scares you. That moment stuck with me and made me terrified to even think of pausing the game after that.
Theres another game that recently does this, but saying WHICH one would be a spoiler itself, because it's blatantly obvious how and when once you know that this game IS going to do this.
Ok what the fuck is yomawari cause above this it says that you end up killing your dog mid tutorial. I’m a funger addict but even that doesn’t make you kill your dog! (Without warning at least. Your dog can very much still die)
@darmandez Pointing out that other games do it too and its awesome. I can tell you which game I was talking about if you'd like, just trying to avoid spoiling the surprise for people who care. Those who know, know.
There is a game where you're not even guaranteed safety in the pause menu. In Voices Of The Void, normally you can open the pause menu to save the game, but there are some entities that can force you out of the pause menu and they can even still move towards you while the game is paused.
at one point minecraft was the same way. pausing didn't stop anything around you so any monster close enough to sense your presence would come kill you.
I imagine a game where the save prompt text is more like "Do you feel safe?" If you have not ensured that the room and hiding spaces are clear, then something comes out and engages you unfairly if you respond, "Yes"
Or a game with normal save points that prompt something like "Save your game?" except for one instance where the "Do you feel safe?" appears instead. While the player stops to wonder what's going on and what to do, they may not be observant enough to notice the shadow of something approaching behind their character...
tbffff sleeping isn't saving but I get the point~~~ And it was worse back in the early beta of the game as it would just spawn random mobs on you on TOP OF NOT LETTING YOU SLEEP XD
That's more like refusing(?) Xenia than violating it. You are given clear conditions under which you can rest, but once you meet those, you can rest easy knowing the game won't spawn a Creeper in front of your door suddenly.
An interesting premise to me would be a game that violates Xenia with its "safe zones" specifically when you're doing the "evil" playthrough. Like, everything seems to be paying off story-wise and you're getting away with all your vile & selfish acts... until the game itself betrays YOU like you've been betraying the game's characters. A diegetic punishment for roleplaying a shitty character. 🤔
@@creppersaurusrex2300 Undertale kinda just says if you do an action it won’t always be forgotten about if you try to reset. But your actual save points are always generally Okay
0:34 In beginning, you forgot to mention one big point. There is a good chance if Zeus is disguised as someone needing shelter. He will transform into you and sleep with your wife.
Every time I hear the word "evil checkpoints/save zones", I immediately think of The Room in Silent Hill 4. It's a safe zone that gradually becomes corrupted the more you progress in the game's story. Heck, in the later parts of the game there will even be objects that can kill you there. Imagine being able to die in supposed "safe" locations.
That sounds kinda similar to the way Fear and Hunger 2 does it. The game is blatantly inspired by Majora's Mask and gives you a three day time limit to reach the end. Time only progresses when you rest, with each day consisting of a morning, afternoon and night, so in other words if you save by resting nine times across your entire playthrough then it's game over. And the hardest difficulty starts your playthrough at Day 3 Night.
@@beardalaxy Same. I ended up just watching a few different play-throughs and eventually a lore dissection. Recommend Worm Girl's breakdown if you're interested.
This was the example I was looking for. For the entire game it feels like it's both the safe room, and the place where the story progresses. It's even in first person, while the other parts of the game where you fight stuff is in third person. This makes you assume nothing will hurt you there because there would be no way to defend yourself... It's one of the biggest subversions I've ever encountered in a game.
Not mentioning The Room in a video like this, while showing other Survival Horrors as examples of proper safe rooms makes me really sad. It was brilliant, it almost made me drop the game 😂. Fear and Hunger at least explains to the player that "sorry my dude, this safe space is not so safe!", while in The Room it just... happens. You return, hoping for some healing and you get hit in the face. Brilliant.
While not exactly the same, i love how in Kirby 64, if you pause during the final boss, the exit stage button is replaced with one that says "Tough it out!" that functions identically to resume.
the funniest implementation of this mechanic is in Dark Souls 2 where Aldia just pops out of the ground when you light a bonfire and dump exposition on you
It used to be worse, on release the crossbow guys would still shoot at you while you sat at the bonfire with bolts flying overhead. If you sat long enough, they would try to reposition after missing enough bolts and just run up and shoot you forcing you to stand up from the bonfire. I sat down there and left the game and came back full hollowed with all my armor broken.
The vanilla version of DS2 had a cruel twist after the Duke's Freya boss, where Vengral's decapitated body guarded the bonfire in the room over and would lunge at you if you came close.
Weirdly there is one grace in Elden ring where it’s not safe (kinda). The shaded castle ramparts I believe. A hollow like guy can attack you while you sit at the grace.
Another Crab's Treasure does the whole "bonfire mimic" thing with in the deep sea level (probably the most arduous of the game) where approaching what you think is finally your Moon Snail Shell checkpoint is actually the already inhabited by the next boss. The game mercifully respawns you right outside the boss arena when you die, but the impact of slogging through that level only to think you'll have to do it again as a boss walkback is such a great moment of defeat that matches Kril's own ennui at that point in the game
The fake-out save spot in Undertale is actually just as telegraphed (if not more) than the Symphony of the Night example. It is *in your way*. It sits, immobile and impassable, in the middle of a path you have to cross to continue. And there's absolutely no alternate route or way around it, and save points don't vanish after use in this game. Not to mention that you're already in an entire facility of things that can change shape or behave weirdly. So as soon as you see it, you're meant to be like 'OH yeah that's completely fake', as opposed to it *really* being a fake-out.
yeah if anything it's just one of the many setpieces in the True Lab that just had me internally screaming my first run (I wasn't really into horror much when I first played Undertale so even smaller atmosphere bites like that had my nope sensors blaring)
It's criminal that you didn't mention alien isolation. When you hear the beeping of the phone, you get excited. One in particular, they let you hear through a door, and it takes about 30 minutes to finally find it. But as you approach it, the dread that the alien might take away your chance to save starts to rapidly increase. I remember the first time I made it to a save, only to see "hostiles nearby", and didn't know what to do. I didn't know if I'd get soft locked or not, so I didn't save and tried to get the alien away first. The tension was insane
@@dimitrifake53 you can't save in Alien: Isolation if the xenomorph or another hostile entity is nearby and actively hunting you. And 'nearby' doesn't necessarily mean in the same room, as long as it's a radius close enough to the save point. This is also to ensure that you don't end up saving the game only to die immediately or shortly after, especially if you're the kind of player who doesn't use multiple save slots.
I feel like this doesn't show up very often because it messes with a player's ability to perform time management. Suddenly you can't say things like "I will stop playing at the next save point." which may or may not be acceptable based on people's real life situations.
That was my beef with it for a long while. I had limited time to play, so when I base my play time ending on the upcoming save point, only for the game to say "SIKE! That was funny, huh? 😂" I got annoyed. I felt like my irl time was disrespected, and I have to choose between going over my allotted time or losing already-spent game time dealing with this "joke" that's even less funny or fun when encountering it the second time. I still don't think I like that too much. I'm unsure why it still bothers me so. Maybe because of the intentionality built in the programs to "lie" to the player. A human (or group of humans) made a conscious decision to lull their player into a sense of security with a basic game mechanic, and then punish the player for trusting "this is how our game works" by sabotaging the mechanic.... Hmmmm.... This might be a metaphor for common autistic gripes... Um... hmmm. Found it in real time, huh. ...🤔
@@savvivixen8490 I think all games should have suspend saves that are easy to access if not anywhere. Save so you can do real life stuff, and when you get back into the game and load the save, it's deleted. Time is also why I don't like corpse running mechanics. Never played any Souls game for that reason.
@@AnotherDucksounds lovely in theory, in practice if a game doesn't allow you to save anywhere it's because it's not designed to work with you saving anywhere. Personally I think ganes should auto save on every loading screen, in different save files, but this also runs into problems if the game is open world, since most open world games do not want loading screens
You mentioned hollow knight doing this in the distant village, however it does it in another part but it is far more brutal (as sitting in distant village still saves your location just in a slightly part). At the start of deepnest from the entrance in mantis village, you go through many narrow passages with creepy enemies, unsettling sounds and spikes that pop out of the floor. All of that continues until you drop far down to a room with a bench, a hot spirng and even that iconic music you get for most bench locations. And when you sit on the bench, it works just like any other bench. The catch is that now you are trapped in deepnest, even dying or quitting and returning will not get you out. Which means you have to find your way out, and you can't even go back up where you came from. Maybe this doesn't count because the save point works as expected, however it does manage to make you regret saving in it
In eternal darkness, there are a handful of... let's just say jumpscare when your character's sanity is low enough and one of these is faking to erase your save file.
Pokemon had a reverse of what this video talks about Pokemon had bins players could check, most of which is nothing but a waste of time, except for a handful of bins that do contain items, causing some players to check every bin they spot even when the majority of them are actually empty
That's what I liked about Blue Dragon. Even if you search something and find "nothing" you still get something. When I first found the vendor that uses "nothing"s as currency I knew my hours of painstakingly searching every box, barrel, and crate hadn't gone to waste.
Notes about fear & hunger since I really care about this game being represented properly. There are two safe ways to save your game: • Books of Enlightenment, one-time consumables that you can find as you scavenge for resources. • There is exactly ONE bed in the entire game that will be a guaranteed safe save, no matter how many times you sleep in it, so long as the right conditions are met. I won’t describe further cause that’ll ruin the surprise, but it does exist.
There is one guaranteed book of Enlightenment in a hard to reach place in the mid game, all others have to be a random rare drop from bookshelves. Which require a coinflip to even get anything out of.
I think one thing that needs to be mentioned is how impactful Save Games working or not is to a game. Whether you have a Save Game completely changes the genre. And when a game is built around saving progress, and it FAILS... it can kill a player's will to continue playing it. I have a game in my library that I may never touch again: The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. I played the game for several hours. I saved my game. When I came back, the save game was gone.... last played, _Dec 18th 2013._ And that was only after a few hours of playing. I've seen people devastated from seeing their 100 hours of sandbox gameplay wiped from a bug. Absolutely destroys all drive to play the game. They walk away and never come back. Hard to give a second chance in such a competitive market for our attention. It is one of the most single critical game elements that needs to work. You can royally mess up everything else, and people will still play.... bug wipes all progress? That's it.
Yeah. I love the xcom games, but I never turn ironman mode on because of how many people warned that their autosave got corrupted and lost all of their progress. It seems to be a common bug across every game. I just play the normal mode with autosave turned on so I can play like it is ironman.
I lost a TBOI save recently (like a year ago recently) and I'm just...I'm done, retired, 3000 hours across MULTIPLE saves, and that one has pretty much done it. I have no will to play it. While that IS an extreme example, it just fosters this feeling like this isn't worth my time anymore. And that was a bug, imagine doing it on purpose.
When Cassette Beasts first launched, it has some glitchy issues around saves that the developers were able to work around. But shortly before that was implemented, a brief power outage lost me a nearly finished save that had a bunch of pre-launch goodies and more. I was devastated, and barely came back to finish the game. It hurts because I was so hyped for the game, and it actually met and exceeded my expectations. But now it's tainted by that loss.
The one that stuck with me was the Firelink Shrine bonfire in Dark Souls. It's the bonfire you'll frequent the most early game and it's in a central location, you'll return often. Hearing the music and the crackling of the fire put me at easy every time I returned to it...until the crackling is gone. Turns out someone killed the Firekeeper of that Bonfire. Respite is gone. This not only made me hunt down the person who could've done this, but as a player I felt betrayed that one of my most used checkpoints was gone.
This is a really odd example but there’s a rhythm game called Cytus 2 that does something that feels spiritually akin to this Obviously there’s no “save room” in a rhythm game, the save point is when you finish a song. But at one point it pulls an unexpected trick. Each character who has songs associated with them has a little background animation to the song select screen, with one sat in their room at their computer. After hitting a certain level with that character though, instead of going back to the normal select screen you see that animation without the song select, loud keyboard tapping suddenly present, when the monitors lock up with a strange symbol and the character let’s go of the keyboard in frustration. The song select screen is now a glitching version of itself, with the character missing from the background, and completing the next song reveals that they were hacked and have been taken in for questioning. They’ll be missing from their room for quite a while. The song select menu is supposed to just be a mechanical space for you to select something whilst the backgrounds add style and mood. Breaking that, making it part of the story, made me wonder why we even have this view into a characters personal space. Suddenly it was a dynamic space rather than a static representation of their personality.
Omg I love how someone actually knows about this. I have a special affinity for that game and it always warms my heart when somebody recognizes it, even if I don't play it that often anymore.
I was stumped by what Xenia could be in gaming until I heard the save music and thought "no, they would never". A fake save point is so cruel even the souls series doesn't cross that line.
They do kinda mess with your sense of safety in Demon's Souls. There's a character that can show up in your safe hub that will sneakily start killing the other NPCs that have settled there, one by one. Also from a certain point in the story you will return to the hub and find that its soft and calming music has been replaced by a far, far more ominous version of itself. I still remember the dread and confusion I felt when that happened.
@@Maurrokh in dark souls 3 thanks to what i asume is an oversight a machete enemy can attack you in the undead settlement while your under the bridge bonfire.
That one time in Elden Ring when you try to warp to Roundtable Hold but instead arrive at a dark version of it and get invaded by Ensha, that wears a creepy skeleton armor.
I thought for a second, "Thank goodness Zelda doesn't use mimics." Then I remembered the DS game Like-Likes with Rupees on angler fish-like limbs and the Switch games with Octoroks with chests on their heads. Oops.
In Poacher (created by Yahtzee Croshaw) you have these touch-and-go save rooms dotted all over the game world. They are their own separate rooms so enemies can't follow you in. Near the end of the game you're in an abyss, separated from your friend who is being judged by an ancient entity, the voice in the sky telling you to bugger off as it has no claim on your soul. As you defy this voice and attempt to save your friend, you pass a save room. Most players will instinctually save here but when they do they fall deeper into the abyss to themselves be judged on any amoral actions taken during the story
Surprised you didn't include Silent Hill 4 in this. The perfect of definition of breaking ξενία. You go from your apartment being the safest place you can be, to a mistreated guest in your own home. It's absolutely fascinating. Great video!
The fucking room gave me nightmare, you could never be sure where the next haunting will appear and you better stockpile healing items cause you no longer regenerate health in the room.
Resident Evil games have one additional layer of promise: The promise that a safe room is always safe, and the promise that whenever the music calms down, it means all enemies in the room have been killed.
I love the part where you go into detail about the line drawn between Saving and Resting in Lisa: The Painful, which made me think "What are the odds Daryl starts talking about Fear and Hunger?" and then 'Wham' I hear the intro music to Fear and Hunger. Great transition
Yeah I was feeling smug thinking Daryl hadn't played Funger until Cahara's dumbass suddenly popped up in the video. He even shouted out Eyepatch Wolf's vid which was my intro to the game
Another good example of this in recent times I would say is Amnesia: the bunker. Roughly halfway through the game you will come back to your safehouse only to find that the monster has dug a hole in the wall, indicating that you are no longer safe.
I would like to point out that there is ONE instance of breaking "right of guest" in the first Dark Souls. Its when you return to Firelink from Blighttown only to find that the Fire Keeper is murdered, and the bonfire no longer functions.
It's interesting that a lot of examples of this happen in indie/smaller games, outside of maybe the bench jumpscare from tlou2. I wonder if we'll see more smaller teams and devs in the future get inspired to flip the script on more things we all take for granted. Also, that edit at 14:30 really caught me off guard lmao, excellent work Daryl 😭
I think it's because indie games can afford to take these kinds of risks with their design, while AAA games have to play things safe in order to have a wider appeal
As others have said, Indy games generally are much more willing to take risks and be weird than AAA games. The main reason is that a AAA game is a huge financial investment for a company that very much is making a product that must sell. (Same way Ford must sell automobiles or go out of business) In contrast a lot of Indy games are made by people who aren't at huge financial risk if the weird game they make ends up unpopular. Obviously some are made by small studios, but many like Undertale and lethal company are just made by some dude in their free time for fun, and end up bigger hits than planned. It leads to an interesting relationship where the bigger a games budget the higher "fidelity" / technical quality it can have, but the lower the risk/ambition its permitted to ensure it breaks even. So the best game won't be the one with the biggest budget because that needs to sell too many titles to risk not being mass marketable.
For better or worse, the Resident Evil 3 Remake has one "fake" safe room that has an item box and typewriter, but Nemesis can chase you into it. The main giveaway, as I recall and the internet has reminded me, is that the music doesn't play, giving you some foreshadowing that even with a save point and item management available, you aren't "truly" safe.
This reminds me of that one Amalgamate in Alphys' True Lab in Undertale that disguises itself as a checkpoint star. It also brings into question "Are The Stars ACTUALLY there!?!"
Here's a scary game design idea that might have the potential to go well beyond violating Xenia: False resting points are scary because of how they betray your trust, but what if the distrust could go beyond those areas? This is assuming that it could be physically possible as well as ethically applicable, but what if you couldn't trust the game even when you're not actively playing it? Picture this: You're playing a horror game(think a hybrid of Silent Hill and Resident Evil but in a gothic medieval setting) and you're planning on taking a break since you've already been playing for a while. You go into a safe room, save your data, and exit out of the game. You turn off your game system(or PC) and call it a night. The next day, you're getting ready to play another game when you get a Trophy/Achievement notification regarding the horror game you were playing that says, "Don't keep me waiting." As you're playing your other games, you get new notifications from your horror game even though you're not playing it. The notifications seem to describe whatever the most recent notable action was performed by one of the primary monsters. Examples: "The Dark Fiend has moved you to a new room in the castle." "The Wretched Goblin has left a new secret for you to find." "The Whispering Witch has put a new spell on you." You open the game up to find out that all the notifications are indeed correct. The game plays with you just as much as you play with it. This would just be how it starts. Let me know what you think of this idea.
@@creppersaurusrex2300 I mean, the notifs would be really annoying, but that can be solved just by having it only tell you these things when you actively check on them, even if you're not booting up the game. I think it'd be a moderately cool idea to have effects happen in game for every X amount of time you're not playing it, just don't spam me to tell me about it.
@@SapphireDragon357 If I got a notification like this, say, once every 24 hours after quitting the game, that'd be my cup of tea right there. I love this idea so much!
Another example of this to me is in-game menus, which typically guarantee that you’re safe while you browse them, especially if doing so pauses the game. One of the most unnerving experiences I’ve had playing a game was playing PT with a friend and pausing the game on a menu, then grabbing drinks, and returning just as a jumpscare occurred while still in the menu. No pause was safe after that!
Imagine my surprise when the second time I went through that area, I planted a land mine in front of the closed door and when I got to the table, the entire ambush got deleted instantly. Part 2 was an insanely well made experience
After the video ended, I immediately checked the comments to see if anyone mentioned this, lol What made the ambush extra devious is that the game subtly gives you clues that something isn't quite right. The apartment you enter has chimes over the door. A bit weird, but nothing too unusual. There's evidence that the area has been occupied for a while, but that's normal in a world where people scavenge and rest where they can. Lastly, there's a very generous amount of supplies. That's...odd...but...maybe you got a bit lucky. And then, as soon as you use the workbench and let your guard down, you get grabbed seconds later by a stranger. Then, as you fight back, you immediately wonder how the hell you got conned. After the fight ends, it immediately hits you. Those chimes? IT WAS A SILENT ALARM SYSTEM TO ALERT THE OCCUPANTS. Also, all the evidence of the place being occupied with excessive belongings? Yeah, that stuff belonged to the quartet that attacked you. The game dulled your suspicion with the cozy setting and used it against you. It is absolutely diabolical and brilliant. Needless to say, every other workbench made me immediately paranoid from that point on, lol.
13:25 resident evil remake did something similar. You always know that a once you cross a door you are always safe no matter what was in the prior room. In one of the rooms a hunter tears the door down as you are leaving. No warning, pure jumpscare. The previous and current room stay connected from then on as one, since the door is busted. No more loading screen.
An even better Chrono Trigger one is in the future sewers where you are cautioned not to make noise, and several things in the room do if you touch them, leading to a battle. Save points make a sound when you touch them, and indeed, triggers a fight.
Everyone compliments you on how charismatic your presentation is or on how thoughtful and compelling your takes are or on how masterfully edited your videos are, but I haven't yet seen anyone compliment you on the fact that you *LOOK* like a Daryl. Seriously, hats off to your parents for naming you because you just embody the name "Daryl" so well.
as soon as I realized you were talking about checkpoints and safe rooms (and breaking that rule) in the intro, I thought of Amnesia: The Bunker. then Deepnest
Me too. I even gave a presentation on an academic conference on this topic (the potential of turning a safe zone into a not so safe one in video games) and The Bunker was my prime example (alongside with SH4: The Room)
Fatal Frame is the one forever burned into my head; you have to capture ghosts using a camera, which means you have to switch to first person view, aim and take the shot, but since you're in the save spot, it's damn well almost on top of you to begin with. I also loved the one in Silent Hill The Room. Like, there's a billion unsettling things about your apartment you're trapped in, but once you have one of the spirits float in and there's barely any room to move around, you just stay freaked out from then on.
While a bonfire mimic represents the most heinous breach of trust in gaming, my personal favorite dark souls fan concept is the ladder mimic. Sitting on a ledge, hanging its ladder tounge down, just waiting for a snack. Muah
@@ShadowCube264 Reminds me of the barnacles hanging from the ceiling in Half-Life. I thought it was some sort of rope, so I walked into it, only for it to grab me and try to eat me. Lesson learned: never trust ropes in video games
Another Xenia i could mention would be Dead Rising, in the 2nd game you have a "safehouse" where you take all your survivors, can usually progress the story, customize your Chuck Greene, and generally, be safe, until Late in the game theres a Breakout Within the safehouse, Forcing you into a scramble to close the gate and kill the zombies while all the survivors you saved and are in here with you scramble to stay alive while you try to make the place safe once more
While slightly different in several regards, in the game Noita, there are a special floors called Holy Mountains. They provide a store, the ability to change your loadout, a full health restore and other things you'd expect of a safe room/checkpoint. However, uncommonly they can be damaged from enemies like tunnel worms digging through or acid melting into them. When this happens you instead encounter an enemy rather menacing to new players and ominous music accompanying it. Now grabbing the health early means you might take damage and go into the next floor harmed, not taking it might be the difference between life and death. Veteran players may deliberately spawn this enemy to get gold.
I’m Elden Ring, I ran away from one of the big knights into the stormviel church where I knew it was a “no combat zone.” Imagine my surprise when the banished knight did not in fact care, and I had simply put myself at an even bigger disadvantage than before.
Its not a bug,the no combat zone is just a way for From to not make you attack important NPCs,and they dont attack you either,the regular mobs can still attack you.
For me, I think safe rooms being surprisingly dangerous, could work, but the problem would be if it became too prevalent. Could be just the games I play, but I don't see too many treasure chest mimics abound, and the save rooms that are obviously off, like Hollow Knight or Symphony of the Night I think really work. Giving the player a sense that something is off, and letting them fall into the trap either by their own failure to notice something is off, or just letting them inflict the false save room upon themselves is kind of neat. The act of ripping safety away however should be used sparingly. Either for a game that's ramping up in intensity, so it's less "All save rooms are potentially a threat" and more "save rooms in this particular area are potentially a threat" to heighten an area's paranoia or thematic threatening-ness. Some games can also use a save station not being safety as a basic mechanic, as I believe Alien Isolation has a decent few save stations, but done in such a way you always feel like something could come up behind you and rip you out of your act of saving. In the end, it's a balancing act. When where and how much do you turn a thing of safety into something of a threat? When do you take safety away to impress upon the player just how much danger they are in? It is a tool, but a dangerous one, one that every major trend follower would scramble for should enough peoples' reactions be entertaining enough. But then if it was used by everyone the shock is no longer there, because everyone would no longer associate save rooms and stations with safety. Once the social contract is broken more than it is upheld, why there just isn't a contract anymore, and the safety of safe rooms becomes a myth of the past.
Fear and hunger actually does have a bed that you can save at any number of times for free, but it’s quite close to the end, and very out of the way at the top of a tower. If you saved after every single thing you did, you’d definitely not have the resources needed
In a rpg maker game called Last Scenario, you save at certain crystals. Then you find a facility experimenting with those crystals. Then you find a room completely full of those crystals, you can use any of them. And then you start getting attacked by living crystals with teeth.
Dark Souls has three types of unusual checkpoints: First, the Fire Keeper Bonfires, which are temporary and go away if someone kills the Fire Keeper. There are three of these, one in Firelink Shrine, one in Anor Londo, and one in Quelaag's Domain. Second are the hidden Bonfires, the ones behind illusory walls or well off the critical path. There are four of these, in Darkroot Garden, The Catacombs, Lost Izalith, and Sen's Fortress. There's also one in the Depths that requires you to get a key from the giant rat, then backtrack to the room with the Bonfire. The third type of unusual checkpoint is the Bonfire that locks you in an area and forces you to fight your way out. There are two "hard" examples and a few more "soft" examples. The "hard" examples are the Duke's Archives prison tower Bonfire and the Bonfire in the Painted World of Ariamis. A "soft" example could be the Bonfire in Ash Lake or the first Bonfire in Tomb of the Giants, since if you access these areas before you can warp with the Lordvessel, you're stuck there until you backtrack through the long, arduous path you took to get there.
It is a huge testament to that game that I can remember the locations of every one of these bonfires as they're listed out. I don't know if I could call out every one on my own, but I can easily think of at least a couple examples of the hidden bonfires and the challenge ones.
I also think it's worth mentioning the Aldia appearances in Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin. You go to rest at the bonfire after a long trek, and BOOM you get thrown backwards, and if it's a first playthrough, you're instantly on edge thinking you've got another fight on your hands. It doesn't actively punish the player in any way, but it constantly subverts expectations and keeps you tense.
I don't recall the title, but i remember an rpg maker game from over 20 years ago where each time you reached a save point your party would have a conversation with it. The protagonist and it don't get along, and the only really memorable point in the game is evetually, the protagonist finally enrages it and you have to battle it as a boss before it will help you.
Several custom campaigns really like doing something effectively similar by baiting safe rooms. The Glubtastic series (very satisfying to play through at least once, if you can handle the troll level design), The Evil Within (very good homage to the game), among others.
Don’t know if it counts as a safe room but the main lobby in the RPD in Resident Evil 2 remake, Mr. X can follow you there and that cop guy can turn into a zombie and attack you there. The room has both a typewriter and a storage box.
sort of, zombies and Mr. X can't roam in the lobby until Marvin becomes a zombie, but the area behind the desk where the typewriter is is a safe zone. B runs remove that typewriter entirely.
As a player I never felt tricked or betrayed by enemies in that room, because it never felt like a safe room. Safe rooms have safe room music, that room doesn't. Safe rooms are small and cozy, that room is spacious. Safe rooms have one or two exits, that room has many doors, some of them locked by key items. It felt to me like a save point was placed in the main junction room for my convenience, but it never felt like the room was supposed to be safe.
My favorite one of these is from Amnesia: The Bunker because it is totally your fault if the save room because unsafe. It doesn't feel like a trick of a one-time gag, but closing and locking the door is something that you need to remember of every time you go back to the central room. Edit: A few days later now I remembered another example. In Outlast, and many other horror games for that matter, there are various ways to hide from whatever monster is chasing you. Hiding in a locker seems to be a very common method. It's not always safe, but it's only unsafe if you get caught entering it. In the dlc for Outlast, there is one locker where the game puts you in a situation where you have to hide in it. No matter if you get caught or not, the stalker enemy will pick up the locker you are in and take you with him. It is a scripted moment, but scared the shit out of me the first time.
That's a sort of unsafe save room I respect a lot more. When the player has control and just have to remember to MAKE the area safe, but once its safe it won't trick you from there.
But in The Bunker the safe room stops being safe altogether. at some point when you get back from an expedition to reassess the situation and save, you find that the monster has dug a new hole there, so you aren't safe even when the door are closed. The monster isn't programmed to go out that hole, but you can't know that at that point, leaving you with the feeling that at this point, there isnt a single spot in the bunker that is safe, and thats fucked up. Also, on the hardest difficulty added in the Halloween update (I think) the door can't be locked and are made of wood so they can be broken by the monster just like every other door in the game. Then its just a room in which you save the game, and not safe room. There's also this one area in which you can climb the sniper tower. Seeing the sun for the first time in ages, first you are relieved and feel safe because the monster can't climb the ladder, but you are quickly reminded that there is war going on outside the bunker as the bullet from the enemy sniper flies by next to your head.
The best example of violating Zenia that I can think of is the violation of the sacred trust between the player that is starting a new game and the game that has the job of explaining itself to the player. I am talking about what I like to call the corrupted tutorial. In odd world, to get the true ending, you have to save all your brethren from becoming meat pies. On one of the first screens, you can see one of your brethren a little distance away. On this screen, the game teaches you how to interact with objects, specifically, how to pull a lever. When you pull that lever, your brethren falls to their death. That’s it. No good ending for you. You ruined your run of the game on one of the very first screens. Because you did exactly what the game told you to do, during a period of time when there are supposed to be no consequences for your actions, because you are just learning the game. Yet that isn’t the corrupted tutorial that sticks out most in my mind. To be honest, I think of that as clever and funny. But the one I remember most is viciously cruel. Yomawari is a cute little game where you play as a chibi girl looking for her big sister. The game opens with you walking your dog down the street at night. There’s an ominous hum sound playing in the background, and it’s hard to see where you were going because of the darkness. But the cute character art style and the little yips from your dog are comforting enough for you to ignore that ominous humming ambience. The game teaches you how to walk. The game teaches you how to run. The game teaches you how to tiptoe. The game teaches you how to pick up a rock. The game teaches you how to throw the rock. Then game teaches you it’s world is dark and merciless and you should trust no one. Because the moment you throw the rock, your little dog runs after it, yipping all the while. A truck smashes right into him. The screen cuts to black. When it fades back in, your cute player character is hugging herself and trembling, still clinging onto the now empty leash where her dog should be. There are games that pretend to be harmless and then shock you in the middle by suddenly revealing their true colors. And then there are games that never even gave you a chance to settle in. That’s what a corrupted tutorial looks like to me.
Yomawari seriously fucked me up and I'm a grown man. It was for something I did entirely to myself. I didn't get far in the game. I was exploring, and I found a cellphone or something. It told me NOT to turn around. So what do I do? I turn around. Lo and behold, there's a fkin monster that starts sprinting at me the moment I see it. I go to run, only, I'm standing on a grate, and suddenly, a hand reaches up and grabs my ankle, locking me in place, dooming me to die. This all happened in the span of like 5 seconds and I haven't had a bigger scare in my life since literally almost being buried alive as a kid. That is an evil fkin game. I haven't touched it since. Left my story and a positive review on Steam, though
@@FKyoutubeSERIOUSLY I think I remember that sprinting monster that you’re talking about. The monsters in the game had really simple designs, and yet they always managed to look so uncanny, and that combined with the unearthly way that they moved made them so disturbing. I think the best kind of horror games are the ones that leave you simultaneously freaked out/complaining and yet you can’t help but think of it as a positive experience that you would recommend.
@@mikesproductionsgamedev That's kind of how I think of the first Amnesia game. It terrified me as a kid but I will definitely recommend it since it's probably one of the best made horror games I've played.
Hollow Knight, in the hot springs in Deepnest, has a chance of a Dirtcrawler popping up at the springs and is the only time you can get hurt in one of these rooms. They are very easy to kill but a bit of a shock to fight.
An interesting example of something like this is Bravely Second: End Layer (slight spoilers for the end of the game) It's a turn-based RPG, but it has a really cool and interesting mechanic where you can essentially stop time and temporarily freely attack with your party through a special item. It creates a really interesting dynamic where you can sort of suddenly decide that it's your turn, but it comes at a pretty steep usage limit. However, through the entire game, it's always assumed that you're the only one with this power. And then suddenly, against the final boss of the game, it starts using that power against you. Suddenly, you're not even safe from taking damage when choosing your own actions, and you have to actually start making rushed on the fly decisions in a turn based game. These games do so much more when it comes to messing with elements that are traditionally "gamified" (this isn't even the most insane moment in this game or even *in this fight*), and it always amazes me how a AAA game was able to get away with this sort of thing (in the best way possible)
A word of advice to anyone playing any of the Baldur's Gate or other Dungeons & Dragons titles that feature the spell Time Stop. While you are immune to it's effects when you cast it, some other characters in the game are too. Including, say, imprisoned demon lords at the bottom of expansion-sized prison dungeon complexes..
Can't believe he forgot to include rdr2's false sense of security while setting up a camp. In that game you can set up a camp almost everywhere in the wild and for the most part of the game nothing happens. You can use that moment to cook foot, prepare yourself for shootouts, fast travel and sleeping to get some rest, as well as skipping a few in-hours. Yet this rule of security is violated once you camp in the swamp areas of the game, where you are suprised by the visit of a disgusting gang called the Mufree Brud, that warn you that you're camping in their territory and will attack you, just like the night folk, if you camp there again. Often that's also the first time meeting this gang and it is a very frightening experience
Oh man. When I ran into that scene I was more annoyed than frightened. A little scared? But mostly just vowing to myself that okay, this gang is dying. By my hand. A guy can't even sleep in peace? You did this to yourselves.
One big reason fake checkpoints aren't great is that is disrespects your IRL time--if I need to find a stopping point before going to bed or leaving for IRL commitments, I don't want to have to suddenly find myself choosing to either lose progress in a game or risk being late for something else. Like, people have lives outside of video games, man!
Agreed. Even if I’m not running late, I get fatigued quickly and favor short play sessions. When a game expects me to have set aside hours at a time it pisses me off
The trick seems to work best either when it's used sparingly and kindly (e.g. when a real one is nearby) or when expectations of that sorta thing are set early (Fear and Hunger is certainly clear and consistent about what it is).
In the final level of the original Crash Bandicoot, there is one stack of crates that has a tnt hidden in the middle so that when you spin the whole stack, you die. It’s the only stack in the entire game with a tnt in the middle, meaning you’ve been conditioned to spin stacks of crates for the entire game without thinking about it. That *one* stack of crates creates paranoia for *every* stack of crates in *every* subsequent Crash Bandicoot game. It only appears once in the entire game, but that one time instills a certain paranoia that can never be undone because of how great the scale of the betrayal is
FromSoft have actually kinda sorta did play with this idea. Normally in Dark Souls, resting at a bonfire resets all enemies. You're taught if the enemies get to be too much, you can run back and sit, and everything will be fine again. Except for Black Knights, they don't reset from bonfires. So when you first discover one, try to fight it, start getting your face stomped in, and decide to reset at a bonfire, the Black Knight doesn't care. It might be my favorite part of the first game, especially since when you die next to the bonfire, getting your souls is easy enough.
One game that pulled off a really great fake checkpoint recently is Another Crab's Treasure. Petroch, the False Moon, is admittedly relatively easy to see coming - it's arena has all the very obvious tells of a boss arena, and it takes place at the lowest point in the game physically and emotionally so you're already expecting the game to throw you off balance even further. Still, it's a powerful moment and a great climax to the that particular section of the Unfathom
Speaking about safe point being unsafe, how about Silent Hill 4's Room 302 being haunted? I mean, I know it has something to do about the MC being a shut-in hence the room getting haunted is sending him a message or a fear to tackle or something.
This was the first thing I thought of. Silent Hill 4 is a great example of it done well. Its a part of the story that doesnt break immersion and makes sense.
I feel like an asterisk to the savepoint mimic concept is that there should be no repeats, you need to know that that was the one and only time this happens Because one, doing the same thing is not so interesting and two, if you don’t and people think a mimic is in every savepoint hereafter, that gets exhausting and you practically get no benefit from the savepoint
Daryl, I just want to say as a game developer, I love your talks about game design being more than just systems and mechanics. That fiction, no matter how fantastical and escapist it may be, can be contextualized in very human framing. Checkpoints and safe spaces are always just assumed and taken for granted in game design, but I love how you even went beyond and explained the conventions of Xenia, parallels to Greeks customs, and how such a violation of it can lend itself to some interesting ideas for gaming.
The fakeout hotel sequence in Earthbounds Threed town is still one of the most memorable parts of the game for me, was so unsettling as a kid due to the music and absence of the guy at the desk
You mentionned Undertale, but there is one other huge betrayal of safety that this game punishes you with. In the fight against Sans, you end up being attacked even in the menu ! In a turn-based game, I consider this just as terrible as a fake checkpoint.
i know the camps in baldur's gate 3 aren't 100% safe, but yknow what feels like breaking xenia with camp battles? the fact that my DOG can permanently die if killed in them. that's just cold, man.
@@GeneralKenobi69420 we aren't all basement-dwellers, my friend. and being weird about furries in 2024 is just tacky, you won't get any pats on the back for it. cheers!
@@tinycatfriendfrom the point of view of mentally sane adults furries have always been cringe and always will be. Not something someone who pretends to be a gay rainbow dog in his free time and j off to sonic inflation would ever understand though.
Funny example from Joseph Anderson "Amnesia: Bunker" stream. Monster not only can walk into save room, you can trap it there and explore map without fear of being persued (untill monster despawn).
Ah, yes... The Fire Keeper's murder in DS1's Firelink Shrine. The ambushes at Arthur's lone campsites. Hell, even Amon turning off the lights in Artanis' command room in SC2 during the mission selection. Love when games peel off that layer of safety that's so easy to get too comfortable in.
Many don't like how Fear and Hunger makes you flip a coin to save. But there are many counters to this, also I like how even the saving feels like an obstacle. Keeps the player on edge.
I can’t believe you just said Xenia always applied in Resident Evil games while playing footage of Mr. X! In RE2, right after he appears, he’s able to follow you into the central area of the police station, where the save point and storage is. The first time I played this section I was 100% sure he wouldn’t be able to follow me there but he just kept coming. One of the scariest moments in the whole game for me
Undertale goes beyond breaking the sanctity of save points but, near the (true) end, it even breaks the sanctity of the save file. There are few things more terrifying than your safe file being deleted... and that game not only proves it, but, then, forces you to suffer those extra terrifying possibilities. I can not give more details without spoiling that moment... but I genuinely thought I was having a nightmare. Because it seemed so impossible, it was the only way I could rationalize what was happening before my eyes.
I remember the first time this happened to me. Trials of Mana (except it was back in the emulation only days, so I guess Seiken Densetsu 3) had one dungeon (a ghost ship) that was full of cabins with beds, where you'd get the option to sleep, but trying it would just get you ganked by ghosts. Only one bedroom worked "properly" in the entire place. It was already one of the more oppressive dungeons and that definitely made the atmosphere even worse
I remember the moment in Alien Isolation (spoilers duh) where you put on an EVA suit. It happens a couple of times during the game. It is a slow cinematic action, you pick up the helmet, the screen fades to black... But THIS TIME, the vent is open above you, you can see it in the reflection on the helmet, aliens pops up, scary stuff, yada yada... The game purposefully made all the suits change be as long as they are, for this specific instance, where they make you slowly realize you are the OPPOSITE of safe. To me, this was exactly the same feeling of betrayal of xenia. Changing the unspoken rules of the experience. And even more, doing it right when you remove all possible control from the player.
IMO betraying the player during a cutscene is the opposite of scary. There's a good reason why the "cutscene weakness" trope is as known as is it reviled
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What is your favorite treacherous checkpoint? What did I miss? Let me know below!
Sure! I can’t wait to give all my information to yet another company!
Please don't support Chinese spyware
Chinese Scam!
I'm surprised there wasn't a mention of the one workbench in The Last of Us Part II, that genuinely made me jump as i had put down the controller to get a snack when I heard the commotion
God damn it, the chinese got Daryl too. Abandon ship
Cave Story does a really funny thing where one of the very first doors you encounter in the game is actually an enemy you have to defeat before going through the door, so first-time players will distrust many doors afterwards, but this never happens again
I love Cave Story tbh, easily one of my favorite 'jokes', introducing something at the start of the game, and then never show it again. What's funny is that everytime I replay it, it always gets me for that exact reason lmao.
tbh Cave Story has a ton of game design bits that I feel like their only logical origin has to be "It'd be funny doe." Like the whole thing with fucking Booster in the Labyrinth is absurd.
@@Alt-fg3ml Skipping the first fight against Balrog feels like a similar joke, where if you just say "I don't want to fight" he just goes, "Oh, okay" and peaces out
It's truly a genre experience, it's not only relate to one game - look at souls games. I've never trusted chests in Elden Ring, just because of being afraid of mimic or trap (different than teleportation). It's curious that if there wasn't a single trap in this game I would be... dissapointed
Reminds me of Luigi's mansion 1 where there are various fake doors that hurt you when you try to go through them.
They are pretty easy to identify because the map only shows the real door locations, and the vacuum will rattle real doors but not fake ones.
The original Resident Evil 3 has a moment where you return to the save point after spending a long time searching for an item. You enter the room and there is no save song. You approach the typewriter and nemesis crashes down from the roof. Starting a chase sequence when we least want it.
Original Dead Space has a save spot that makes a necromorph spawn breathing down your neck when you finish upgrading your weapon.
I was searching the comments, hoping someone would mention that from Re3!
The original Resident Evil 2 also has a safe room where the safe room itself is safe, but if you open a door on the far side, two zombies walk through it and you're forced back into the safe room to fight them as a truly terrifying track plays. This is a double example of breaking xenia because this is the only time in the game where you're attacked while in the room transition cutscenes. I played that game when I was twelve and I'm *still* a little afraid of that stupid door.
@@napoleoncomplex2712 nice! I didn't know that. I think I will get an emulator to relive the good ol days.
@@napoleoncomplex2712is that in the B scenario? The guard house in the outside of the police station or something?
REmake 2 hall savepoint, where Mr X can enter. It's not the same thing as the aforementioned events because it's not a save room as the others, but I remember finding Leon dead in the entrance hall when I got back from grabing some water. I was like: wtf?
I feel like in the Hollow Knight example, it's important to note that a real save point is found very, very shortly after the fake one. If memory serves there's no combat between the two and no way to miss it. It wants to mess with you, but it''s not actually trying to screw up your progress.
Yeah it immediately gives you a checkpoint. Dying or quitting out right afterwards doesn't reset you back on the other side of Deepnest, thank god lol
You are in the middle of a maze, with the center being that checkpoint as well as the start point, so you can't progress at all until you escape, no saving partway through. And if you go in what the game seems to be telling you is the intended order, you will have to get through that maze twice, one of then going backwards! Once to escape, and once to find the goal inside.
@@Nightfire613yes, but you never lose progress. If you die, you start from the webs after the fake bench but with all your health. You just can’t change charms.
@@tsirakura1684you've missed the point of what makes that bench unsettling. It's because you have no idea where you are until you find the exit and realise it's just above the fake bench, but until then, you're stuck in these corridors with dangerous enemies and ambushes
@@nikolapetric7089 I know what the point is, I’ve got over 1k hours in the game and still remember the horror I felt when I first sat on that bench. What I shared is still a fact about how the game works, you won’t lose any progress however scared you are.
In Dead Space 1 they establish elevators are safe.
In Dead Space 2, they drop a necromorph on you in the elevator.
While also making you a little nervous still about them in the first game. Since the first one you go into, you see a necromoph rip the doors open. Showing they can definitely get through them even if it gets immediately killed by them a moment later. Nevermind that (at least I'm pretty sure there are some that do this) some of the elevators will open the door behind you instead of the one you came in from.
i remmber in 1 i was fixing an elevator fighntging enemies i think as it went up or at least they made scary noises i cant rememember
There's a save point in Dead space 1 where a necromorph can attack you the moment you save. In fact this breaks Zenia for me so much that when I went to the same corridor in Dead space 2, I immediately escape the safe machine and point frantically behind me waiting for an attack that ... never comes.
@manhphuc4335 Yeah I think there's a store in 1 or 2, and a bench in 1 or 2, where they do it as well.
@@thedankswordsmantmI'm pretty sure it's the one next to the elevator to the mines or whatever that lower level was
Miyazaki was once asked about the mimic bonfire. He responded by saying that he wouldn't dream of betraying the player's trust like that. He probably felt the same as you've mentioned: players would no longer trust bonfires for the rest of the game.
bonfires are the perfect signifier for safety, they bring such a comforting feeling in a very bleak, and hard game. Miyizaki knows what he's doing
Many normies, including a lot of cashgrabbing journalists (I'm not actually a journalist hater like so many gamers tend to be because they are easy to manipulate by ragebait) used to, and still do, spread around this idea that Dark Souls was the "hardest game evar omg lol xd"
And with that came the stereotype, born from nothing but sheer ignorance and stupidity, that dark souls, and soulslikes in general, are for "masochists". For people who want to suffer and never enjoy good gamedesign.
This effectively was not only one of the vilest misinterpretations and therefore sources of misinformation on what Dark Souls was all about, it was also just plain manipulative and effectively ushered in an era of second rate games trying to emulate that "masochism".
In reality, miyazaki never meant to make the "hardest game" (and didn't succeed even if that WAS his intent. Only zoomers would have considered dark souls to be hard. Sure there are hard spikes in difficulty, and some levels and bosses are just plain badly designed, but overall the difficulty is perfectly fine. You don't need to be a challengerunner or speedrunner to play it. You just need to not be a complete moron.)
He just remembered what games used to be like, what was so fun about these challenging games, what worked and what didn't, and built his game around that premise. (Obviously, he started doing that with demons souls, not dark souls, but it's not like the internet ever gave him credit for it. History, to many zoomer gamers, starts in 2011, not 2009. Justified or not.)
And the game design reflects that inherent aversion to the "masochist" mentality detractors, and in some cases glorifiers, of Miyazaki's work claim soulslikes are all about.
To this very day, you constantly find edgy ragebaiters and elitist fanboys alike, claiming their victory or failure over a freaking game has turned them into masochists, or has given them an aversion to "masochistic" game design.
This is an inherent failure to recognize good from bad gamedesign. A failure to recognize good from bad reward systems. This mentality is inherent to the sheepherd gamers who either grew up on or got mentally culled by the slew of handholding games that started to explode around the early 2010's, and whose influence and constant poison we still experience to this day.
No. Dark souls is not masochistic. Nor is it perfect. Nor does it want to "punish" the player. Nor does miyazaki like to "torture" the gamer. Nor is the game's quality RELIANT on that fact. Miyazaki, from the very get-go, understood the sacred nature of the contract that the developer signs along with the player. Yes, these games might toy with the concept a little here and there, but never to such an outrageous degree, as violating the sacred trust that, for instance, the bonfire provides. (Not that I am claiming games that don't do this are inherently bad. They're just trying something different. And I would guess that they TOO aren't there to be masochistic, except maybe fear and hunger. This game just seems plain evil.)
There is nothing more annoying to me, than seeing a gamer complain about some badly designed boss in one of these games (especially elden ring, which has garnered a following of critically blind fanboy sheepherds. As if the game can't do wrong.) and get reactions from these elitist dickheads saying they're just "playing the game wrong" or that they just need to "git gud". As if souls veterans need to get told to git gud merely because they think gimmicky fights or attacks that cover all of the screen or unpredictable delayed combos or one-shot kills are bad design.
You find this mentality of elitism, absolutely festering in the souls community, whose pride seems to be derived from the fact they once beat a fromsoft game that one time. A true achievement and highest honor to these spoiled western privileged cunts.
As if, indeed, elden ring and dark souls were either the holy grails of game design (they aren't, far from it, these games are fundamentally flawed in several ways, and that's okay.) or the worst games of all time, sent to earth to destroy our puny gamer brains with mental torture. As if all forms of criticism, constructive or otherwise, need to be banished to the nine hells for the AUDACITY of it.
Miyazaki never had that mentality, and actively seems to read and listen to complaints and criticism. Nor should his fans or detractors. It's time to grow up.
@@RedFloyd469 you let it slip a bit by adding the "western" to the "priviliged cunts" phrase. Tbh, I agree with you, but the difference is that I am happy at these things. Because dark souls managed to get game marketers to call it masochistic, smile and recommend it after informing of that fact! Which conveyed the exact idea you explained (which is, ironically, that its not masochistic at all). Because don't forget, reviewers do absolutely often call something "difficult" and then give it a poor review because of that reason. That intuitively conveys to the readers that the challenge is not fun to beat, that it _is_ actually masochistic.
Yeah, that does misinform the readers on the actual definition of those words. Most creators do understand that customers don't know that they really want or mean though, so its not as big of a deal as you make it to be.
The Aldia bonfire in DS2 being the one exception
@@mahominishiyama124 and ds2 does a shit load wrong, mostly cause miyazaki didnt make it
I actually appreciate that Dark Souls and Resident Evil don't troll you with fake safe zones because it would violate one of the core creative pillars of their game design and needlessly punish the player out of spite
I dunno, I would love just _one_ fake save point.
Just one, in only one game, and one you can foresee like the music sounding off or blood splatters on the walls, stuff like that.
Original Resident Evil 3 has it in the clock tower. If you run away from Nemesis when going to save he jumps down through the roof glass at the save spot. Its super creepy because when you enter the room there is no music.
Resident Evil 2’s remake does it *once* with the lobby of the police station
Dark Soul DOES take away your main save point if you help one person
@@TheBlindWeasel And Dark Souls 2 has jumpscare bonfires.
To add a little as the dev of I Wanna Be The Guy, and, hilariously, the person who coined the term Mental Stack, part of the reason the "Evil" save point is the last one is because I actually wanted to avoid adding to the player's mental stack. The game had enough paranoia, and I didn't want to make the player paranoid about *the one* thing I was treating as sacred.
... Buuut since I built up all that good will, I might as well have spent it at the end, where it wouldn't have any long term repercussions on how players approached the game. ;)
and you even called it 16 years ago in your first iwbtg video, what a legend lol
Very impressive stuff there
You are a legend
That's the perfect way to do it. Because even if you do one fake out and even if you shortly after give a real one, it will forever linger on the player's thoughts of "What if this one isn't real?" and "What if the next one doesn't have a save so close?"
I'm sure most people would say they'd love at least one fake out, but the end of the game is the only place for that, because otherwise, it'll always weigh on the player's mind.
I'm sure there's some exceptions, as it's a mix of many things, but it's soemthing one must be very careful if they do test the player's trust.
Was obsessed with that game, I'm not even a fan of 2d platformers but it felt more like a puzzle game that constantly outsmarted me. Good memories, I think I still have the laptop I downloaded it on all that time ago
I still remember playing Darkest Dungeon and getting ambushed while camping… Reynauld, let thy sacrifice not be in vain
Unassumedly rest with the dancer in your party and get transported into the snake pit right about every damn time
Darkest Dungeon, in my humble opinion, is one of the greatest games ever made. Hearing the premise "what would actually happen to somebody, not just physically, but also psychologically, were they to explore video game dungeons?" was all I needed to be sold. My girlfriend lovingly refers to it as a "middle management simulator."
Side note: She's also a writer, and a pretty great one at that, and became obsessed with the game's writing and Wayne June's impeccable narration. Two enthusiastic thumbs up from the both of us.
@@angelus_lucifero Oh I absolutely agree, the immersion especially the way they craft the atmosphere using sound design brought me to another gem - Inscryption. 100% recommend playing it if you enjoy the logistics and vibe of Darkest Dungeon!
People sometimes compare Darkest Dungeon with Fear & Hunger and as someone who has played both, I can say it's true the games are similar, except that Darkest Dungeon is actually fun.
WAKE UP! THEY ARE UPON US!
At one point during Amnesia: The Bunker, the safe room music no longer plays in the room. You might not notice it at first, given how stressful the game is.
And then you find out why: the beast has dug a hole in the wall from which it can crawl out of. The room is no longer safe.
Last time I played it the beast couldn't crawl out of this hole, did they change it?
@@reformed_attempt_1 Pretty sure the hole is purely decorative, as to signal that time is running low in general and not just fuel. But I've heard (no proof) that save room's doors can be broken by the monster
@GreatNaturalStupidity The Beast cannot break down the doors, however once the hole is dug the Beast can enter the save room. The Beats cannot enter the generator room.
It's tied to difficulty. On the standard difficulty settings the stalker won't enter the safe room from the hole, but if you carelessly leave the doors open it can definitely follow you into the safe room, and even the generator room. Try it yourself.
Then the 2023 Halloween update came along and the Shell Shock difficulty was added. On Shell Shock, not only can the stalker spawn from the hole that appears in the safe room, the doors to the room are now made of wooden boards instead of metal, meaning that once they're broken they're gone for the rest of the playthrough. It also costs fuel to use the lantern so you have to decide if you'd rather save or keep the lights on a little longer, because when they go out the stalker will never stop hunting you.
Shell Shock also has:
- Increased generator fuel consumption
- A fuse system that prevents the lights in areas from coming on with the generator until the fuses are fixed
- Increased and randomized spawns of trip-wire traps and killer rats
- Randomized spawning locations for essential items
- Lowered spawn rates and random spawn locations for all other items
- Greatly increased stalker aggression, alertness, activity, and worst of all, unpredictability. It'll create diversions, silently lie in wait, route you into dead ends while you try to escape, things like that.
It's fun!
My favorite example of this isn't from a safe-room or save point, but your pause menu. In the horror game Yomawari: Midnight Shadows from NIS America, you're opening your pause menu a lot in the intro scene to check the map, check your inventory, and check your objective. The third or fourth time you do it, you're guided to find a new item and read it's description, when a monster slams its hands onto your pause-menu, pulls it down and jump-scares you. That moment stuck with me and made me terrified to even think of pausing the game after that.
I shat myself when that happened lmao, I still haven't finished it yet but I have to some time the game has a really amazing atmosphere
Theres another game that recently does this, but saying WHICH one would be a spoiler itself, because it's blatantly obvious how and when once you know that this game IS going to do this.
Ok what the fuck is yomawari cause above this it says that you end up killing your dog mid tutorial. I’m a funger addict but even that doesn’t make you kill your dog! (Without warning at least. Your dog can very much still die)
@@TheRagingAura ... what is the point of your comment? lol
@darmandez Pointing out that other games do it too and its awesome. I can tell you which game I was talking about if you'd like, just trying to avoid spoiling the surprise for people who care. Those who know, know.
There is a game where you're not even guaranteed safety in the pause menu. In Voices Of The Void, normally you can open the pause menu to save the game, but there are some entities that can force you out of the pause menu and they can even still move towards you while the game is paused.
at one point minecraft was the same way. pausing didn't stop anything around you so any monster close enough to sense your presence would come kill you.
In Hades II it's the same when you fight against Chronos
Love Voices of the Void, need to update it and play again
I know that this has nothing to do with what’s actually being talked about.
But you could _technically_ say that almost all online games do this too.
You can blame Mr. Joel Vargskelethor and his habit of pausing the game anytime he gets spooked for that one
I imagine a game where the save prompt text is more like "Do you feel safe?"
If you have not ensured that the room and hiding spaces are clear, then something comes out and engages you unfairly if you respond, "Yes"
That is a clever idea.
Basically another take on "You cannot rest with enemies nearby" but the player can get punished for attempting it.
Or a game with normal save points that prompt something like "Save your game?" except for one instance where the "Do you feel safe?" appears instead. While the player stops to wonder what's going on and what to do, they may not be observant enough to notice the shadow of something approaching behind their character...
@@acepirosu5871This sounds neat in theory but god knows we'd all button mash through without even noticing the change in text.
Fear and Hunger Termina has something similar to this I think
@acepirosu5871 that would be wonderfully scary
"You can't rest when there's enemies nearby"
Thanks, Mojäng.
(Stolen quote from another Daryl vid)
tbffff sleeping isn't saving but I get the point~~~ And it was worse back in the early beta of the game as it would just spawn random mobs on you on TOP OF NOT LETTING YOU SLEEP XD
That's more like refusing(?) Xenia than violating it. You are given clear conditions under which you can rest, but once you meet those, you can rest easy knowing the game won't spawn a Creeper in front of your door suddenly.
Why did this comment get 700 likes? It was just the first thing that popped into my head.
@@eclipsicalbluestocking1182 XD like yeah all the skellies and creepers looking in my window is why I wanna rest lmao. Please save me bed
An interesting premise to me would be a game that violates Xenia with its "safe zones" specifically when you're doing the "evil" playthrough. Like, everything seems to be paying off story-wise and you're getting away with all your vile & selfish acts... until the game itself betrays YOU like you've been betraying the game's characters. A diegetic punishment for roleplaying a shitty character. 🤔
Undertale does this when you are doing the genocide run
@@creppersaurusrex2300 none of the saves are affected though
@@creppersaurusrex2300 Undertale kinda just says if you do an action it won’t always be forgotten about if you try to reset.
But your actual save points are always generally Okay
@@globe0147 Smells like lemons
@@ladygeneveve3805 huh?
0:34 In beginning, you forgot to mention one big point. There is a good chance if Zeus is disguised as someone needing shelter. He will transform into you and sleep with your wife.
Even so, probably in your best interest to give shelter. Better to raise the next Hercules than piss off Zeus.
@@ActionPackedJack definitely 😂 👿➕🌩️➕🏠🟰🏚️
@@ActionPackedJack But by doing so, you piss off Hera. It's a no-win situation.
@@sheepking9540 It might be a win-win for the wife
Every time I hear the word "evil checkpoints/save zones", I immediately think of The Room in Silent Hill 4. It's a safe zone that gradually becomes corrupted the more you progress in the game's story. Heck, in the later parts of the game there will even be objects that can kill you there. Imagine being able to die in supposed "safe" locations.
That sounds kinda similar to the way Fear and Hunger 2 does it. The game is blatantly inspired by Majora's Mask and gives you a three day time limit to reach the end. Time only progresses when you rest, with each day consisting of a morning, afternoon and night, so in other words if you save by resting nine times across your entire playthrough then it's game over. And the hardest difficulty starts your playthrough at Day 3 Night.
That is actually part of why I haven't played the game yet, to be honest.
@@beardalaxy Same. I ended up just watching a few different play-throughs and eventually a lore dissection. Recommend Worm Girl's breakdown if you're interested.
This was the example I was looking for. For the entire game it feels like it's both the safe room, and the place where the story progresses. It's even in first person, while the other parts of the game where you fight stuff is in third person. This makes you assume nothing will hurt you there because there would be no way to defend yourself... It's one of the biggest subversions I've ever encountered in a game.
Not mentioning The Room in a video like this, while showing other Survival Horrors as examples of proper safe rooms makes me really sad. It was brilliant, it almost made me drop the game 😂. Fear and Hunger at least explains to the player that "sorry my dude, this safe space is not so safe!", while in The Room it just... happens. You return, hoping for some healing and you get hit in the face. Brilliant.
While not exactly the same, i love how in Kirby 64, if you pause during the final boss, the exit stage button is replaced with one that says "Tough it out!" that functions identically to resume.
the funniest implementation of this mechanic is in Dark Souls 2 where Aldia just pops out of the ground when you light a bonfire and dump exposition on you
Or that bonfire in the fort with crossbow knights that immediately pathfind to you when you get up from the bonfire menu.
scares me everytime
It used to be worse, on release the crossbow guys would still shoot at you while you sat at the bonfire with bolts flying overhead. If you sat long enough, they would try to reposition after missing enough bolts and just run up and shoot you forcing you to stand up from the bonfire. I sat down there and left the game and came back full hollowed with all my armor broken.
The vanilla version of DS2 had a cruel twist after the Duke's Freya boss, where Vengral's decapitated body guarded the bonfire in the room over and would lunge at you if you came close.
Weirdly there is one grace in Elden ring where it’s not safe (kinda). The shaded castle ramparts I believe. A hollow like guy can attack you while you sit at the grace.
Another Crab's Treasure does the whole "bonfire mimic" thing with in the deep sea level (probably the most arduous of the game) where approaching what you think is finally your Moon Snail Shell checkpoint is actually the already inhabited by the next boss. The game mercifully respawns you right outside the boss arena when you die, but the impact of slogging through that level only to think you'll have to do it again as a boss walkback is such a great moment of defeat that matches Kril's own ennui at that point in the game
And that boss (from what I remember) was one of the toughest bosses in the entire game
@@Quackers_up Yeah, surprisingly tricky bosses throughout- very underrated in the soulslike conversation!
The fake-out save spot in Undertale is actually just as telegraphed (if not more) than the Symphony of the Night example. It is *in your way*. It sits, immobile and impassable, in the middle of a path you have to cross to continue. And there's absolutely no alternate route or way around it, and save points don't vanish after use in this game. Not to mention that you're already in an entire facility of things that can change shape or behave weirdly. So as soon as you see it, you're meant to be like 'OH yeah that's completely fake', as opposed to it *really* being a fake-out.
I feel like it has a pretty good chance of fooling people, but given its location you're very likely to react with "Ah! But also, that's fair."
yeah if anything it's just one of the many setpieces in the True Lab that just had me internally screaming my first run (I wasn't really into horror much when I first played Undertale so even smaller atmosphere bites like that had my nope sensors blaring)
It's criminal that you didn't mention alien isolation. When you hear the beeping of the phone, you get excited. One in particular, they let you hear through a door, and it takes about 30 minutes to finally find it. But as you approach it, the dread that the alien might take away your chance to save starts to rapidly increase.
I remember the first time I made it to a save, only to see "hostiles nearby", and didn't know what to do. I didn't know if I'd get soft locked or not, so I didn't save and tried to get the alien away first. The tension was insane
Literally could have made the whole video about it, Alien Isolation is a masterclass in breaking the players trust with save points.
@@f3ryxReally? Never expiranced that.
@@dimitrifake53 you can't save in Alien: Isolation if the xenomorph or another hostile entity is nearby and actively hunting you. And 'nearby' doesn't necessarily mean in the same room, as long as it's a radius close enough to the save point. This is also to ensure that you don't end up saving the game only to die immediately or shortly after, especially if you're the kind of player who doesn't use multiple save slots.
@tcchip I managed to save and then died as I left the animation.
Then it loaded to that save and the monster was gone.
The alien isolation vr mod is the single most afraid I've ever been in my life, and ive been robbed at gunpoint.
I feel like this doesn't show up very often because it messes with a player's ability to perform time management. Suddenly you can't say things like "I will stop playing at the next save point." which may or may not be acceptable based on people's real life situations.
That was my beef with it for a long while. I had limited time to play, so when I base my play time ending on the upcoming save point, only for the game to say "SIKE! That was funny, huh? 😂" I got annoyed. I felt like my irl time was disrespected, and I have to choose between going over my allotted time or losing already-spent game time dealing with this "joke" that's even less funny or fun when encountering it the second time.
I still don't think I like that too much. I'm unsure why it still bothers me so. Maybe because of the intentionality built in the programs to "lie" to the player. A human (or group of humans) made a conscious decision to lull their player into a sense of security with a basic game mechanic, and then punish the player for trusting "this is how our game works" by sabotaging the mechanic.... Hmmmm.... This might be a metaphor for common autistic gripes... Um... hmmm. Found it in real time, huh. ...🤔
Quite honestly my main (and possibly only) gripe with the concept. Especially as someone who mostly plays before bed, aha
@@savvivixen8490 I think all games should have suspend saves that are easy to access if not anywhere. Save so you can do real life stuff, and when you get back into the game and load the save, it's deleted.
Time is also why I don't like corpse running mechanics. Never played any Souls game for that reason.
Switch master race unite
@@AnotherDucksounds lovely in theory, in practice if a game doesn't allow you to save anywhere it's because it's not designed to work with you saving anywhere. Personally I think ganes should auto save on every loading screen, in different save files, but this also runs into problems if the game is open world, since most open world games do not want loading screens
You mentioned hollow knight doing this in the distant village, however it does it in another part but it is far more brutal (as sitting in distant village still saves your location just in a slightly part). At the start of deepnest from the entrance in mantis village, you go through many narrow passages with creepy enemies, unsettling sounds and spikes that pop out of the floor. All of that continues until you drop far down to a room with a bench, a hot spirng and even that iconic music you get for most bench locations. And when you sit on the bench, it works just like any other bench. The catch is that now you are trapped in deepnest, even dying or quitting and returning will not get you out. Which means you have to find your way out, and you can't even go back up where you came from. Maybe this doesn't count because the save point works as expected, however it does manage to make you regret saving in it
Sounds like the dutch game example daryl gave, albeit with an actual way out.
In eternal darkness, there are a handful of... let's just say jumpscare when your character's sanity is low enough and one of these is faking to erase your save file.
Pokemon had a reverse of what this video talks about
Pokemon had bins players could check, most of which is nothing but a waste of time, except for a handful of bins that do contain items, causing some players to check every bin they spot even when the majority of them are actually empty
finding the master ball in a trash bin as a kid forever cursed me to never trust the bins to be empty in Pokémon games
That's not the reverse, that's just hidden items. Also, Pokemon has "mimic" Voltorbs that look like items.
So that's where my trash bin checking obsession is from!
Voltorbs, Electrodes, Foongus, and Amoongus. I used to briefly be upset, but now skip to shrugging my shoulders with a, "free experience..."
That's what I liked about Blue Dragon. Even if you search something and find "nothing" you still get something. When I first found the vendor that uses "nothing"s as currency I knew my hours of painstakingly searching every box, barrel, and crate hadn't gone to waste.
Notes about fear & hunger since I really care about this game being represented properly. There are two safe ways to save your game:
• Books of Enlightenment, one-time consumables that you can find as you scavenge for resources.
• There is exactly ONE bed in the entire game that will be a guaranteed safe save, no matter how many times you sleep in it, so long as the right conditions are met. I won’t describe further cause that’ll ruin the surprise, but it does exist.
You can, as far as I can recall, save in normal beds safely as long as you clear the area of enemies. But I could be wrong.
@@PeterSpana this is true
There is one guaranteed book of Enlightenment in a hard to reach place in the mid game, all others have to be a random rare drop from bookshelves. Which require a coinflip to even get anything out of.
Two actually, one where you recruit Enki and one after you've asked the three questions. Plus there's Pocketcat and his super low prices
I've never seen a game I want to love ruined so hard by its game design (mainly save system) as F&H.
I think one thing that needs to be mentioned is how impactful Save Games working or not is to a game.
Whether you have a Save Game completely changes the genre. And when a game is built around saving progress, and it FAILS... it can kill a player's will to continue playing it.
I have a game in my library that I may never touch again: The Bureau: XCOM Declassified.
I played the game for several hours. I saved my game. When I came back, the save game was gone.... last played, _Dec 18th 2013._
And that was only after a few hours of playing.
I've seen people devastated from seeing their 100 hours of sandbox gameplay wiped from a bug. Absolutely destroys all drive to play the game. They walk away and never come back. Hard to give a second chance in such a competitive market for our attention.
It is one of the most single critical game elements that needs to work. You can royally mess up everything else, and people will still play.... bug wipes all progress? That's it.
Yeah. I love the xcom games, but I never turn ironman mode on because of how many people warned that their autosave got corrupted and lost all of their progress. It seems to be a common bug across every game. I just play the normal mode with autosave turned on so I can play like it is ironman.
I lost my first ever save file in Octopath Traveler with a few hours in. It took me years to pick the game up again (it was worth it)
I lost a TBOI save recently (like a year ago recently) and I'm just...I'm done, retired, 3000 hours across MULTIPLE saves, and that one has pretty much done it. I have no will to play it. While that IS an extreme example, it just fosters this feeling like this isn't worth my time anymore. And that was a bug, imagine doing it on purpose.
When Cassette Beasts first launched, it has some glitchy issues around saves that the developers were able to work around. But shortly before that was implemented, a brief power outage lost me a nearly finished save that had a bunch of pre-launch goodies and more.
I was devastated, and barely came back to finish the game. It hurts because I was so hyped for the game, and it actually met and exceeded my expectations. But now it's tainted by that loss.
Rdr2 has a trash save mechanic and fanboys never talk about it. Constantly leads to wasted time and progress.
The one that stuck with me was the Firelink Shrine bonfire in Dark Souls. It's the bonfire you'll frequent the most early game and it's in a central location, you'll return often. Hearing the music and the crackling of the fire put me at easy every time I returned to it...until the crackling is gone. Turns out someone killed the Firekeeper of that Bonfire. Respite is gone.
This not only made me hunt down the person who could've done this, but as a player I felt betrayed that one of my most used checkpoints was gone.
This is a really odd example but there’s a rhythm game called Cytus 2 that does something that feels spiritually akin to this
Obviously there’s no “save room” in a rhythm game, the save point is when you finish a song.
But at one point it pulls an unexpected trick. Each character who has songs associated with them has a little background animation to the song select screen, with one sat in their room at their computer. After hitting a certain level with that character though, instead of going back to the normal select screen you see that animation without the song select, loud keyboard tapping suddenly present, when the monitors lock up with a strange symbol and the character let’s go of the keyboard in frustration. The song select screen is now a glitching version of itself, with the character missing from the background, and completing the next song reveals that they were hacked and have been taken in for questioning. They’ll be missing from their room for quite a while.
The song select menu is supposed to just be a mechanical space for you to select something whilst the backgrounds add style and mood. Breaking that, making it part of the story, made me wonder why we even have this view into a characters personal space. Suddenly it was a dynamic space rather than a static representation of their personality.
Omg I love how someone actually knows about this. I have a special affinity for that game and it always warms my heart when somebody recognizes it, even if I don't play it that often anymore.
I was stumped by what Xenia could be in gaming until I heard the save music and thought "no, they would never". A fake save point is so cruel even the souls series doesn't cross that line.
They do kinda mess with your sense of safety in Demon's Souls. There's a character that can show up in your safe hub that will sneakily start killing the other NPCs that have settled there, one by one. Also from a certain point in the story you will return to the hub and find that its soft and calming music has been replaced by a far, far more ominous version of itself. I still remember the dread and confusion I felt when that happened.
@@Maurrokh Assassin character are pretty common in the series.
@@Szadek23 One that kills other NPCs? I dont think those exist anywhere else
@@garnix5427dung eater in elden ring, suspicious beggar in bloodborne and lautrec in ds1
@@Maurrokh in dark souls 3 thanks to what i asume is an oversight a machete enemy can attack you in the undead settlement while your under the bridge bonfire.
That one time in Elden Ring when you try to warp to Roundtable Hold but instead arrive at a dark version of it and get invaded by Ensha, that wears a creepy skeleton armor.
Nah I violated him
I killed him with two hits 😭
I thought for a second, "Thank goodness Zelda doesn't use mimics." Then I remembered the DS game Like-Likes with Rupees on angler fish-like limbs and the Switch games with Octoroks with chests on their heads. Oops.
There's also the ice chests in Ocarina of Time's Spirit Temple (and probably a few other places)
Even Breath of the Wild had Treasure Chest Octoroks.
There's also the pots and tiles that throw themselves at you in older games
Minish Cap had giant rupees that turned out to be enemies that sucked out all your rupees.
theres a ton of mimcs in zelda games like how the divine beast bosses are fought and the yiga assassins and treasure chest octoroks
In Poacher (created by Yahtzee Croshaw) you have these touch-and-go save rooms dotted all over the game world. They are their own separate rooms so enemies can't follow you in.
Near the end of the game you're in an abyss, separated from your friend who is being judged by an ancient entity, the voice in the sky telling you to bugger off as it has no claim on your soul. As you defy this voice and attempt to save your friend, you pass a save room. Most players will instinctually save here but when they do they fall deeper into the abyss to themselves be judged on any amoral actions taken during the story
Surprised you didn't include Silent Hill 4 in this. The perfect of definition of breaking ξενία. You go from your apartment being the safest place you can be, to a mistreated guest in your own home. It's absolutely fascinating. Great video!
The fucking room gave me nightmare, you could never be sure where the next haunting will appear and you better stockpile healing items cause you no longer regenerate health in the room.
Tears of the kingdom missed the oportunity of scaring the doodoo out of me with a abyssal fish in stead of a lightroot
They already scared the crap out of me with an abyssal lynel so tbh I'm glad they didn't do that lol
Tears has Gloom Spawn and Ganondorf dodges your flurry rush, I think that's enough
There's that one basic shrine that has the floor drop out from underneath you, that got me!
Resident Evil games have one additional layer of promise: The promise that a safe room is always safe, and the promise that whenever the music calms down, it means all enemies in the room have been killed.
I love the part where you go into detail about the line drawn between Saving and Resting in Lisa: The Painful, which made me think "What are the odds Daryl starts talking about Fear and Hunger?" and then 'Wham' I hear the intro music to Fear and Hunger. Great transition
Yeah I was feeling smug thinking Daryl hadn't played Funger until Cahara's dumbass suddenly popped up in the video. He even shouted out Eyepatch Wolf's vid which was my intro to the game
Another good example of this in recent times I would say is Amnesia: the bunker. Roughly halfway through the game you will come back to your safehouse only to find that the monster has dug a hole in the wall, indicating that you are no longer safe.
I would like to point out that there is ONE instance of breaking "right of guest" in the first Dark Souls. Its when you return to Firelink from Blighttown only to find that the Fire Keeper is murdered, and the bonfire no longer functions.
While not a save *point* I love how in ddlc, trying to reload a save from before the hang out session causes Monica to ask if youre trying to cheat
It's interesting that a lot of examples of this happen in indie/smaller games, outside of maybe the bench jumpscare from tlou2. I wonder if we'll see more smaller teams and devs in the future get inspired to flip the script on more things we all take for granted. Also, that edit at 14:30 really caught me off guard lmao, excellent work Daryl 😭
Yeah I noticed that too! It was also funny to see how many were in RPGs
Because AAA projects have to play it safe and appeal to as big of an audience as possible, duh
I think it's because indie games can afford to take these kinds of risks with their design, while AAA games have to play things safe in order to have a wider appeal
My fav jumpscare in TLOU2 was the doggy one 🤨
As others have said, Indy games generally are much more willing to take risks and be weird than AAA games.
The main reason is that a AAA game is a huge financial investment for a company that very much is making a product that must sell. (Same way Ford must sell automobiles or go out of business)
In contrast a lot of Indy games are made by people who aren't at huge financial risk if the weird game they make ends up unpopular. Obviously some are made by small studios, but many like Undertale and lethal company are just made by some dude in their free time for fun, and end up bigger hits than planned.
It leads to an interesting relationship where the bigger a games budget the higher "fidelity" / technical quality it can have, but the lower the risk/ambition its permitted to ensure it breaks even. So the best game won't be the one with the biggest budget because that needs to sell too many titles to risk not being mass marketable.
For better or worse, the Resident Evil 3 Remake has one "fake" safe room that has an item box and typewriter, but Nemesis can chase you into it. The main giveaway, as I recall and the internet has reminded me, is that the music doesn't play, giving you some foreshadowing that even with a save point and item management available, you aren't "truly" safe.
Iirc it’s the one with two doors on the way to the power station.
Yes that, but there's no need for you to go there when Nemesis is chasing you at that point. So most players don't even know about it
This reminds me of that one Amalgamate in Alphys' True Lab in Undertale that disguises itself as a checkpoint star. It also brings into question "Are The Stars ACTUALLY there!?!"
I just got to the part where he mentions them lmao!!!
Here's a scary game design idea that might have the potential to go well beyond violating Xenia:
False resting points are scary because of how they betray your trust, but what if the distrust could go beyond those areas? This is assuming that it could be physically possible as well as ethically applicable, but what if you couldn't trust the game even when you're not actively playing it?
Picture this: You're playing a horror game(think a hybrid of Silent Hill and Resident Evil but in a gothic medieval setting) and you're planning on taking a break since you've already been playing for a while. You go into a safe room, save your data, and exit out of the game. You turn off your game system(or PC) and call it a night. The next day, you're getting ready to play another game when you get a Trophy/Achievement notification regarding the horror game you were playing that says, "Don't keep me waiting." As you're playing your other games, you get new notifications from your horror game even though you're not playing it. The notifications seem to describe whatever the most recent notable action was performed by one of the primary monsters.
Examples:
"The Dark Fiend has moved you to a new room in the castle."
"The Wretched Goblin has left a new secret for you to find."
"The Whispering Witch has put a new spell on you."
You open the game up to find out that all the notifications are indeed correct. The game plays with you just as much as you play with it.
This would just be how it starts. Let me know what you think of this idea.
That would unironically be a horrible thing, and not in a enjoyable way, like, you are describing a yandere in video game form
Sure. As long as the game is free to play with no IAPs.
@@creppersaurusrex2300 I mean, the notifs would be really annoying, but that can be solved just by having it only tell you these things when you actively check on them, even if you're not booting up the game.
I think it'd be a moderately cool idea to have effects happen in game for every X amount of time you're not playing it, just don't spam me to tell me about it.
@@SapphireDragon357
If I got a notification like this, say, once every 24 hours after quitting the game, that'd be my cup of tea right there. I love this idea so much!
@@MiamPachonUy IAP? I'm not sure what that means, but if it's anything like DRM, then you can rest assured it won't have that if I'm making the game.
Another example of this to me is in-game menus, which typically guarantee that you’re safe while you browse them, especially if doing so pauses the game. One of the most unnerving experiences I’ve had playing a game was playing PT with a friend and pausing the game on a menu, then grabbing drinks, and returning just as a jumpscare occurred while still in the menu. No pause was safe after that!
The best example of this for me was the ambush at the crafting table in The Last of Us Part II (:
Same! Usually I find these sort of surprises cheeky, but the Last of Us Part II moment I felt so betrayed XD
Imagine my surprise when the second time I went through that area, I planted a land mine in front of the closed door and when I got to the table, the entire ambush got deleted instantly.
Part 2 was an insanely well made experience
After the video ended, I immediately checked the comments to see if anyone mentioned this, lol
What made the ambush extra devious is that the game subtly gives you clues that something isn't quite right. The apartment you enter has chimes over the door. A bit weird, but nothing too unusual. There's evidence that the area has been occupied for a while, but that's normal in a world where people scavenge and rest where they can. Lastly, there's a very generous amount of supplies. That's...odd...but...maybe you got a bit lucky.
And then, as soon as you use the workbench and let your guard down, you get grabbed seconds later by a stranger. Then, as you fight back, you immediately wonder how the hell you got conned.
After the fight ends, it immediately hits you.
Those chimes? IT WAS A SILENT ALARM SYSTEM TO ALERT THE OCCUPANTS. Also, all the evidence of the place being occupied with excessive belongings? Yeah, that stuff belonged to the quartet that attacked you. The game dulled your suspicion with the cozy setting and used it against you. It is absolutely diabolical and brilliant.
Needless to say, every other workbench made me immediately paranoid from that point on, lol.
13:25 resident evil remake did something similar. You always know that a once you cross a door you are always safe no matter what was in the prior room. In one of the rooms a hunter tears the door down as you are leaving. No warning, pure jumpscare. The previous and current room stay connected from then on as one, since the door is busted. No more loading screen.
An even better Chrono Trigger one is in the future sewers where you are cautioned not to make noise, and several things in the room do if you touch them, leading to a battle. Save points make a sound when you touch them, and indeed, triggers a fight.
Everyone compliments you on how charismatic your presentation is or on how thoughtful and compelling your takes are or on how masterfully edited your videos are, but I haven't yet seen anyone compliment you on the fact that you *LOOK* like a Daryl. Seriously, hats off to your parents for naming you because you just embody the name "Daryl" so well.
2:11 what a weird timing to say this
as soon as I realized you were talking about checkpoints and safe rooms (and breaking that rule) in the intro, I thought of Amnesia: The Bunker. then Deepnest
my mind went right to deepnest bench when i realised what he was getting at in the intro too
I immediately thought of Amnesia: The Bunker as well
Me too. I even gave a presentation on an academic conference on this topic (the potential of turning a safe zone into a not so safe one in video games) and The Bunker was my prime example (alongside with SH4: The Room)
Fatal Frame is the one forever burned into my head; you have to capture ghosts using a camera, which means you have to switch to first person view, aim and take the shot, but since you're in the save spot, it's damn well almost on top of you to begin with.
I also loved the one in Silent Hill The Room. Like, there's a billion unsettling things about your apartment you're trapped in, but once you have one of the spirits float in and there's barely any room to move around, you just stay freaked out from then on.
While a bonfire mimic represents the most heinous breach of trust in gaming, my personal favorite dark souls fan concept is the ladder mimic. Sitting on a ledge, hanging its ladder tounge down, just waiting for a snack. Muah
This has been done in Rain World! Most rooms have poles you’ll need to climb, but there’s plants that mimic these, grabbing you when you get close.
@@ShadowCube264 Reminds me of the barnacles hanging from the ceiling in Half-Life. I thought it was some sort of rope, so I walked into it, only for it to grab me and try to eat me. Lesson learned: never trust ropes in video games
@@andreashansen5313 Look Gordon, ropes! We can use the- HELP ME GORDON!
One of the best examples of this must be Silent Hill: The Room. Even if you're in your "supposed" safe space, you're never truly safe.
Another Xenia i could mention would be Dead Rising, in the 2nd game you have a "safehouse" where you take all your survivors, can usually progress the story, customize your Chuck Greene, and generally, be safe, until Late in the game theres a Breakout Within the safehouse, Forcing you into a scramble to close the gate and kill the zombies while all the survivors you saved and are in here with you scramble to stay alive while you try to make the place safe once more
While slightly different in several regards, in the game Noita, there are a special floors called Holy Mountains. They provide a store, the ability to change your loadout, a full health restore and other things you'd expect of a safe room/checkpoint. However, uncommonly they can be damaged from enemies like tunnel worms digging through or acid melting into them. When this happens you instead encounter an enemy rather menacing to new players and ominous music accompanying it. Now grabbing the health early means you might take damage and go into the next floor harmed, not taking it might be the difference between life and death. Veteran players may deliberately spawn this enemy to get gold.
The gods are angry at YOU SPECIFICALLY, MAGE!
THE FUNKY CRYSTAL WAS EATEN BY A BIG WORM, MAGE!
I’m Elden Ring, I ran away from one of the big knights into the stormviel church where I knew it was a “no combat zone.”
Imagine my surprise when the banished knight did not in fact care, and I had simply put myself at an even bigger disadvantage than before.
Sounds more like a bug
A bug, not a feature.
Sooooo
@@cherubin7th you think so? My conclusion was that it would only be applied to NPCS and not normal mobs
Its not a bug,the no combat zone is just a way for From to not make you attack important NPCs,and they dont attack you either,the regular mobs can still attack you.
lol people saying it's a bug have never played elden ring
For me, I think safe rooms being surprisingly dangerous, could work, but the problem would be if it became too prevalent. Could be just the games I play, but I don't see too many treasure chest mimics abound, and the save rooms that are obviously off, like Hollow Knight or Symphony of the Night I think really work. Giving the player a sense that something is off, and letting them fall into the trap either by their own failure to notice something is off, or just letting them inflict the false save room upon themselves is kind of neat.
The act of ripping safety away however should be used sparingly. Either for a game that's ramping up in intensity, so it's less "All save rooms are potentially a threat" and more "save rooms in this particular area are potentially a threat" to heighten an area's paranoia or thematic threatening-ness. Some games can also use a save station not being safety as a basic mechanic, as I believe Alien Isolation has a decent few save stations, but done in such a way you always feel like something could come up behind you and rip you out of your act of saving.
In the end, it's a balancing act. When where and how much do you turn a thing of safety into something of a threat? When do you take safety away to impress upon the player just how much danger they are in?
It is a tool, but a dangerous one, one that every major trend follower would scramble for should enough peoples' reactions be entertaining enough. But then if it was used by everyone the shock is no longer there, because everyone would no longer associate save rooms and stations with safety. Once the social contract is broken more than it is upheld, why there just isn't a contract anymore, and the safety of safe rooms becomes a myth of the past.
What’s interesting about guest right is it was perpetuated by these holy men who traveled expecting?…guest right.
Fear and hunger actually does have a bed that you can save at any number of times for free, but it’s quite close to the end, and very out of the way at the top of a tower. If you saved after every single thing you did, you’d definitely not have the resources needed
In a rpg maker game called Last Scenario, you save at certain crystals. Then you find a facility experimenting with those crystals. Then you find a room completely full of those crystals, you can use any of them.
And then you start getting attacked by living crystals with teeth.
Dark Souls has three types of unusual checkpoints:
First, the Fire Keeper Bonfires, which are temporary and go away if someone kills the Fire Keeper. There are three of these, one in Firelink Shrine, one in Anor Londo, and one in Quelaag's Domain.
Second are the hidden Bonfires, the ones behind illusory walls or well off the critical path. There are four of these, in Darkroot Garden, The Catacombs, Lost Izalith, and Sen's Fortress. There's also one in the Depths that requires you to get a key from the giant rat, then backtrack to the room with the Bonfire.
The third type of unusual checkpoint is the Bonfire that locks you in an area and forces you to fight your way out. There are two "hard" examples and a few more "soft" examples. The "hard" examples are the Duke's Archives prison tower Bonfire and the Bonfire in the Painted World of Ariamis. A "soft" example could be the Bonfire in Ash Lake or the first Bonfire in Tomb of the Giants, since if you access these areas before you can warp with the Lordvessel, you're stuck there until you backtrack through the long, arduous path you took to get there.
It is a huge testament to that game that I can remember the locations of every one of these bonfires as they're listed out. I don't know if I could call out every one on my own, but I can easily think of at least a couple examples of the hidden bonfires and the challenge ones.
Another bonfire that is add to that list is the one at the bottom of blight town for low level players without the lordvessel
also the blacksmith vamos bonfire that they added in remastered, though that's just a slightly less oppressive version of the totg bonfires
@@BladesPrincess I've been there :')
I also think it's worth mentioning the Aldia appearances in Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin.
You go to rest at the bonfire after a long trek, and BOOM you get thrown backwards, and if it's a first playthrough, you're instantly on edge thinking you've got another fight on your hands.
It doesn't actively punish the player in any way, but it constantly subverts expectations and keeps you tense.
I don't recall the title, but i remember an rpg maker game from over 20 years ago where each time you reached a save point your party would have a conversation with it. The protagonist and it don't get along, and the only really memorable point in the game is evetually, the protagonist finally enrages it and you have to battle it as a boss before it will help you.
Imagine if in a Left 4 Dead campaign, you get to a saferoom, but when you shut the door, the exit door opens and an alarm goes off
Several custom campaigns really like doing something effectively similar by baiting safe rooms. The Glubtastic series (very satisfying to play through at least once, if you can handle the troll level design), The Evil Within (very good homage to the game), among others.
Don’t know if it counts as a safe room but the main lobby in the RPD in Resident Evil 2 remake, Mr. X can follow you there and that cop guy can turn into a zombie and attack you there. The room has both a typewriter and a storage box.
sort of, zombies and Mr. X can't roam in the lobby until Marvin becomes a zombie, but the area behind the desk where the typewriter is is a safe zone. B runs remove that typewriter entirely.
As a player I never felt tricked or betrayed by enemies in that room, because it never felt like a safe room. Safe rooms have safe room music, that room doesn't. Safe rooms are small and cozy, that room is spacious. Safe rooms have one or two exits, that room has many doors, some of them locked by key items. It felt to me like a save point was placed in the main junction room for my convenience, but it never felt like the room was supposed to be safe.
@@GLORPDORP Perhaps not. But the small room under the statue is a save room by all defenitions and undead Marvin can follow you there no problem.
My favorite one of these is from Amnesia: The Bunker because it is totally your fault if the save room because unsafe. It doesn't feel like a trick of a one-time gag, but closing and locking the door is something that you need to remember of every time you go back to the central room.
Edit: A few days later now I remembered another example. In Outlast, and many other horror games for that matter, there are various ways to hide from whatever monster is chasing you. Hiding in a locker seems to be a very common method. It's not always safe, but it's only unsafe if you get caught entering it. In the dlc for Outlast, there is one locker where the game puts you in a situation where you have to hide in it. No matter if you get caught or not, the stalker enemy will pick up the locker you are in and take you with him. It is a scripted moment, but scared the shit out of me the first time.
That's a sort of unsafe save room I respect a lot more. When the player has control and just have to remember to MAKE the area safe, but once its safe it won't trick you from there.
But in The Bunker the safe room stops being safe altogether. at some point when you get back from an expedition to reassess the situation and save, you find that the monster has dug a new hole there, so you aren't safe even when the door are closed. The monster isn't programmed to go out that hole, but you can't know that at that point, leaving you with the feeling that at this point, there isnt a single spot in the bunker that is safe, and thats fucked up. Also, on the hardest difficulty added in the Halloween update (I think) the door can't be locked and are made of wood so they can be broken by the monster just like every other door in the game. Then its just a room in which you save the game, and not safe room. There's also this one area in which you can climb the sniper tower. Seeing the sun for the first time in ages, first you are relieved and feel safe because the monster can't climb the ladder, but you are quickly reminded that there is war going on outside the bunker as the bullet from the enemy sniper flies by next to your head.
The best example of violating Zenia that I can think of is the violation of the sacred trust between the player that is starting a new game and the game that has the job of explaining itself to the player. I am talking about what I like to call the corrupted tutorial.
In odd world, to get the true ending, you have to save all your brethren from becoming meat pies. On one of the first screens, you can see one of your brethren a little distance away. On this screen, the game teaches you how to interact with objects, specifically, how to pull a lever. When you pull that lever, your brethren falls to their death. That’s it. No good ending for you. You ruined your run of the game on one of the very first screens. Because you did exactly what the game told you to do, during a period of time when there are supposed to be no consequences for your actions, because you are just learning the game.
Yet that isn’t the corrupted tutorial that sticks out most in my mind. To be honest, I think of that as clever and funny. But the one I remember most is viciously cruel.
Yomawari is a cute little game where you play as a chibi girl looking for her big sister. The game opens with you walking your dog down the street at night. There’s an ominous hum sound playing in the background, and it’s hard to see where you were going because of the darkness. But the cute character art style and the little yips from your dog are comforting enough for you to ignore that ominous humming ambience.
The game teaches you how to walk. The game teaches you how to run. The game teaches you how to tiptoe. The game teaches you how to pick up a rock. The game teaches you how to throw the rock. Then game teaches you it’s world is dark and merciless and you should trust no one.
Because the moment you throw the rock, your little dog runs after it, yipping all the while. A truck smashes right into him.
The screen cuts to black. When it fades back in, your cute player character is hugging herself and trembling, still clinging onto the now empty leash where her dog should be.
There are games that pretend to be harmless and then shock you in the middle by suddenly revealing their true colors. And then there are games that never even gave you a chance to settle in. That’s what a corrupted tutorial looks like to me.
Bruh what the fuck
Ok, adding Yomawari to "Games I will never play." The world is bleak enough already, thanks.
Yomawari seriously fucked me up and I'm a grown man. It was for something I did entirely to myself. I didn't get far in the game. I was exploring, and I found a cellphone or something. It told me NOT to turn around. So what do I do? I turn around. Lo and behold, there's a fkin monster that starts sprinting at me the moment I see it. I go to run, only, I'm standing on a grate, and suddenly, a hand reaches up and grabs my ankle, locking me in place, dooming me to die. This all happened in the span of like 5 seconds and I haven't had a bigger scare in my life since literally almost being buried alive as a kid.
That is an evil fkin game. I haven't touched it since. Left my story and a positive review on Steam, though
@@FKyoutubeSERIOUSLY I think I remember that sprinting monster that you’re talking about. The monsters in the game had really simple designs, and yet they always managed to look so uncanny, and that combined with the unearthly way that they moved made them so disturbing.
I think the best kind of horror games are the ones that leave you simultaneously freaked out/complaining and yet you can’t help but think of it as a positive experience that you would recommend.
@@mikesproductionsgamedev That's kind of how I think of the first Amnesia game. It terrified me as a kid but I will definitely recommend it since it's probably one of the best made horror games I've played.
Hollow Knight, in the hot springs in Deepnest, has a chance of a Dirtcrawler popping up at the springs and is the only time you can get hurt in one of these rooms. They are very easy to kill but a bit of a shock to fight.
An interesting example of something like this is Bravely Second: End Layer (slight spoilers for the end of the game)
It's a turn-based RPG, but it has a really cool and interesting mechanic where you can essentially stop time and temporarily freely attack with your party through a special item. It creates a really interesting dynamic where you can sort of suddenly decide that it's your turn, but it comes at a pretty steep usage limit.
However, through the entire game, it's always assumed that you're the only one with this power.
And then suddenly, against the final boss of the game, it starts using that power against you. Suddenly, you're not even safe from taking damage when choosing your own actions, and you have to actually start making rushed on the fly decisions in a turn based game.
These games do so much more when it comes to messing with elements that are traditionally "gamified" (this isn't even the most insane moment in this game or even *in this fight*), and it always amazes me how a AAA game was able to get away with this sort of thing (in the best way possible)
A word of advice to anyone playing any of the Baldur's Gate or other Dungeons & Dragons titles that feature the spell Time Stop. While you are immune to it's effects when you cast it, some other characters in the game are too. Including, say, imprisoned demon lords at the bottom of expansion-sized prison dungeon complexes..
Can't believe he forgot to include rdr2's false sense of security while setting up a camp.
In that game you can set up a camp almost everywhere in the wild and for the most part of the game nothing happens.
You can use that moment to cook foot, prepare yourself for shootouts, fast travel and sleeping to get some rest, as well as skipping a few in-hours.
Yet this rule of security is violated once you camp in the swamp areas of the game, where you are suprised by the visit of a disgusting gang called the Mufree Brud, that warn you that you're camping in their territory and will attack you, just like the night folk, if you camp there again.
Often that's also the first time meeting this gang and it is a very frightening experience
Oh man. When I ran into that scene I was more annoyed than frightened. A little scared? But mostly just vowing to myself that okay, this gang is dying. By my hand. A guy can't even sleep in peace? You did this to yourselves.
One big reason fake checkpoints aren't great is that is disrespects your IRL time--if I need to find a stopping point before going to bed or leaving for IRL commitments, I don't want to have to suddenly find myself choosing to either lose progress in a game or risk being late for something else. Like, people have lives outside of video games, man!
Agreed. Even if I’m not running late, I get fatigued quickly and favor short play sessions. When a game expects me to have set aside hours at a time it pisses me off
i do think you should us fak saf room very sparingly if it's very often well that just boring and terrible
Super Thankful that LISA isn't like this cause no matter what comes up you'll never get thrown straight into an enemy encounter.
The trick seems to work best either when it's used sparingly and kindly (e.g. when a real one is nearby) or when expectations of that sorta thing are set early (Fear and Hunger is certainly clear and consistent about what it is).
In the final level of the original Crash Bandicoot, there is one stack of crates that has a tnt hidden in the middle so that when you spin the whole stack, you die. It’s the only stack in the entire game with a tnt in the middle, meaning you’ve been conditioned to spin stacks of crates for the entire game without thinking about it.
That *one* stack of crates creates paranoia for *every* stack of crates in *every* subsequent Crash Bandicoot game. It only appears once in the entire game, but that one time instills a certain paranoia that can never be undone because of how great the scale of the betrayal is
I love horribly placed sponsor ads that kill my interest in a video, 10/10
FromSoft have actually kinda sorta did play with this idea. Normally in Dark Souls, resting at a bonfire resets all enemies. You're taught if the enemies get to be too much, you can run back and sit, and everything will be fine again. Except for Black Knights, they don't reset from bonfires. So when you first discover one, try to fight it, start getting your face stomped in, and decide to reset at a bonfire, the Black Knight doesn't care. It might be my favorite part of the first game, especially since when you die next to the bonfire, getting your souls is easy enough.
One game that pulled off a really great fake checkpoint recently is Another Crab's Treasure. Petroch, the False Moon, is admittedly relatively easy to see coming - it's arena has all the very obvious tells of a boss arena, and it takes place at the lowest point in the game physically and emotionally so you're already expecting the game to throw you off balance even further. Still, it's a powerful moment and a great climax to the that particular section of the Unfathom
Speaking about safe point being unsafe, how about Silent Hill 4's Room 302 being haunted? I mean, I know it has something to do about the MC being a shut-in hence the room getting haunted is sending him a message or a fear to tackle or something.
This was the first thing I thought of. Silent Hill 4 is a great example of it done well. Its a part of the story that doesnt break immersion and makes sense.
2:33 “A strange game…the only winning move is to not play.”
Elden Ring, teleporting back to the table after finding a piece of the medallion for the great lift, getting jumped by Gideons lapdog.
I feel like an asterisk to the savepoint mimic concept is that there should be no repeats, you need to know that that was the one and only time this happens
Because one, doing the same thing is not so interesting and two, if you don’t and people think a mimic is in every savepoint hereafter, that gets exhausting and you practically get no benefit from the savepoint
Daryl, I just want to say as a game developer, I love your talks about game design being more than just systems and mechanics. That fiction, no matter how fantastical and escapist it may be, can be contextualized in very human framing. Checkpoints and safe spaces are always just assumed and taken for granted in game design, but I love how you even went beyond and explained the conventions of Xenia, parallels to Greeks customs, and how such a violation of it can lend itself to some interesting ideas for gaming.
I will have to be very very careful playing your games.
The fakeout hotel sequence in Earthbounds Threed town is still one of the most memorable parts of the game for me, was so unsettling as a kid due to the music and absence of the guy at the desk
Does anyone else remember the generator room in Amnesia: The Bunker? THE RAT THING JUST BREAKS IN!?!?!?!
You mentionned Undertale, but there is one other huge betrayal of safety that this game punishes you with. In the fight against Sans, you end up being attacked even in the menu ! In a turn-based game, I consider this just as terrible as a fake checkpoint.
If you're fighting Sans, you deserve it. That's the point.
@@AlexReynard Correct. That's why I said "punishes" instead of "tricks"
@@theolabbate1611 Touche! I missed that. Good word choice.
@@theolabbate1611 The gods saw what you were doing and decided to revoke your Xenia, just this once.
In the Resident Evil 2 remake, Mr X can follow you into at least one save room, breaking the tradition of them being a respite.
i know the camps in baldur's gate 3 aren't 100% safe, but yknow what feels like breaking xenia with camp battles? the fact that my DOG can permanently die if killed in them. that's just cold, man.
Who let the furry out of the basement 💀
@@GeneralKenobi69420 we aren't all basement-dwellers, my friend. and being weird about furries in 2024 is just tacky, you won't get any pats on the back for it. cheers!
@@tinycatfriendfrom the point of view of mentally sane adults furries have always been cringe and always will be. Not something someone who pretends to be a gay rainbow dog in his free time and j off to sonic inflation would ever understand though.
@@GeneralKenobi69420It’s 2024 bro get over it 💀 ts so corny
"You can have rectal bleeding." Yup, that's Fear and Hunger in a nutshell.
Hello Daryl, I just wanted to say I really really appreciate your editing. It is inspiring
You know what's more cruel? Selling save slots as DLC.
Please name a game that does this so that I can avoid it (and the publisher) like the plague!
@@Atlessa Metal Gear Survive, and I think one of the Yazuka games.
Funny example from Joseph Anderson "Amnesia: Bunker" stream. Monster not only can walk into save room, you can trap it there and explore map without fear of being persued (untill monster despawn).
Ah, yes... The Fire Keeper's murder in DS1's Firelink Shrine. The ambushes at Arthur's lone campsites. Hell, even Amon turning off the lights in Artanis' command room in SC2 during the mission selection. Love when games peel off that layer of safety that's so easy to get too comfortable in.
Many don't like how Fear and Hunger makes you flip a coin to save. But there are many counters to this, also I like how even the saving feels like an obstacle. Keeps the player on edge.
I can’t believe you just said Xenia always applied in Resident Evil games while playing footage of Mr. X! In RE2, right after he appears, he’s able to follow you into the central area of the police station, where the save point and storage is. The first time I played this section I was 100% sure he wouldn’t be able to follow me there but he just kept coming. One of the scariest moments in the whole game for me
Undertale goes beyond breaking the sanctity of save points but, near the (true) end, it even breaks the sanctity of the save file. There are few things more terrifying than your safe file being deleted... and that game not only proves it, but, then, forces you to suffer those extra terrifying possibilities. I can not give more details without spoiling that moment... but I genuinely thought I was having a nightmare. Because it seemed so impossible, it was the only way I could rationalize what was happening before my eyes.
youre so right!
Also in the sans fight, in the last phase he attacks you even in the menu
And then there's There is No Game: Wrong Dimension, which utilizes it in a comedic yet stressful way.
Messing or even joking about messing with saves in games is possibly an evil even beyond violating the safe room rules.
@@PrinceSilvermane Unless it's something that the game warns you about if you continue to do so, like in Banjo Kazooie with the cheat codes.
I remember the first time this happened to me. Trials of Mana (except it was back in the emulation only days, so I guess Seiken Densetsu 3) had one dungeon (a ghost ship) that was full of cabins with beds, where you'd get the option to sleep, but trying it would just get you ganked by ghosts. Only one bedroom worked "properly" in the entire place. It was already one of the more oppressive dungeons and that definitely made the atmosphere even worse
Book of Blood, Book of Death, Book of Curses, Book of Death.
I will never forget this. :D
Can’t believe he didn’t even bring up Amnesia the Bunker
I’m so surprised you didn’t mention Laurtrec and Yurt!
I remember the moment in Alien Isolation (spoilers duh) where you put on an EVA suit.
It happens a couple of times during the game. It is a slow cinematic action, you pick up the helmet, the screen fades to black...
But THIS TIME, the vent is open above you, you can see it in the reflection on the helmet, aliens pops up, scary stuff, yada yada...
The game purposefully made all the suits change be as long as they are, for this specific instance, where they make you slowly realize you are the OPPOSITE of safe.
To me, this was exactly the same feeling of betrayal of xenia. Changing the unspoken rules of the experience. And even more, doing it right when you remove all possible control from the player.
IMO betraying the player during a cutscene is the opposite of scary. There's a good reason why the "cutscene weakness" trope is as known as is it reviled
I just...like, the save/rest mechanic is sacred territory, where I can breathe and mellow out: please don't take that away from me! XD
"I want them to step on me", me too Daryl :'(
Nah I just saw this 💧😄💧 (couldn’t find 😂 emoji)
u time traveler